how the search engine works

search engine perform several activities to deliver search result:

Do you know how search engines work? There are three basic stages for a search engine: crawling – where content is discovered; indexing, where it is analysed and stored in huge databases; and retrieval, where a user query fetches a list of relevant pages



Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).

Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.


EmoticonEmoticon