How Does A Search Engine Work?

Multiple authors

16/03/2025

What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is a tool (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo) that helps you find information online. When you search/type a question or query in a search engine, it will show you the best result or list of web pages, images, videos, or other information about your search. It will scan and organize its database to give the best relevant results. And this process takes just a millisecond.

How A Search Engine Works?

Search Engines like (Google, Bing, or Yahoo) help to systematize the Huge internet. To provide the most relevant result to the user.

The search engine works on three major points:-

CARWALING
INDEXING
RANKING

CRAWLING

What is Crawler? Crawler is a program used by the search engines to explore the internet. They are also known as (Bot & Spiders). Not only search engines, but some websites also have their crawler or bot.

Crawling is the process of exploring the internet or collecting information from the whole internet and storing it. It is called crawling. The crawler moves from one website to another or from one webpage to another, mainly using links. Crawler scans all the website pages except those disallowed by the user with the help of the robots.txt file. These files tell crawlers not to scan these pages. Crawler scans everything like Text, Images, Videos, and even meta titles and meta descriptions.

The crawler works under 2 processes:-

Scheduler
Crawler (Spider)

Scheduler: The scheduler tells the crawler which URLs they want to scan and in which order. It helps to organize resources smoothly. And follow rules to avoid website overloading.

Crawler: Crawler is a program used by the search engines to explore the internet. They are also known as (Bot & Spiders). Not only search engines, but some websites also have their crawler or bot.

INDEXING

Indexing is the process of storing the data collected or scanned by the crawler.

Majorly Indexing goes through 3 main stages:-

PAGE REPOSITORY
PARSER
INDEXING

PAGE REPOSITORY: Page Repository is the hub or headquarter of the raw data collected by the bot or crawler.

PARSER: It is the main process where the core components are extracted from the web pages like images, text, videos, or meta description and meta title.

INDEXER: It is the last stage of indexing in which the data is analyzed and converted into easy searchable data or easy to search.

RANKING

In the ranking, the search engine decides the order of web pages based on relevance, quality, and other significant factors. This factor determines which web pages are on the top and which are on the bottom.

The ranking works on 3 main factors:-

QUERY ENGINE
ALGOGRTHM
FEEDBACK LOOP

Query Engine

It is a system or setup that processes the search queries and finds the most relevant results for you from its database.

It works step by step:-

It will receive a query.
It will process the query.
It will find results.
It will display the results.

ALGORITHMS

The algorithm is a set of rules and instructions to solve a problem and help to perform a task. With the help of this algorithm, a search engine decides the ranking of web pages based on relevance and quality. Then, it determines which webpage is shown at the top.