How Do Search Engines Work? Beginner To In-Depth Guide
Ren Hao
Updated 21 January 2023
Before I share with you how the Google search engine works, do you know what is Google Search Engine Optimization (Google SEO)? Let us talk about this, Google SEO is a method of optimizing our Google search results to make it easy for users to find what they need quickly and also for the right people to see the right content.
After we know how the Google search engine works. You understand the fundamentals of how search engines work and we can start doing basic SEO on our website. Once you master Google SEO, you can gain more visibility like first page rankings and more qualified website leads, ultimately increasing your business conversion rate and gaining clients.
Before we start, SEO can be divided into 3 parts, On-Page SEO, Technical SEO and Off-Page SEO. In this context, I am going to share with you step by step from beginner to in-depth how Search Engine work before we do any SEO optimization for our website, which will help you do Google SEO easier and more effectively in the future.
1.0 How Do Google Search Engines Work?
At a high level, search engines work by crawling the internet, indexing the content they find, and then providing relevant results to users based on their search queries. Here are more details on the 3 main steps:
Step 1: Crawling
Search engines use programs called “web crawlers” or “spiders” to discover new pages and update their indexes. These crawlers follow links from one page to another, much like a person would while browsing the web. They start at a set of “seed” pages and then follow the links on those pages to find new pages, which they then add to their list of pages to crawl.
You can think of Google as a big library, and crawling is like checking whether there are new books in our library, which means whether there are new pages or updated content on our website, and record them, then ready to update into Google system, it means update into our library book list system.
Step 2: Indexing
As the crawlers find new pages, they send the content of those pages back to the search engine’s servers, where it is added to the search engine’s index. The index is a huge database of all the pages that the search engine knows about. When you search for something, the search engine looks in its index to find the most relevant pages and display them to you.
In short, after the crawler knows that our website has a new page or has been updated with new content, it will index it into the Google search engine servers. In other words, when it knows that the library has a new book today, it is added to the library’s book listing system and arranged by category.
Step 3: Serving Results
After the Google crawler finds the new page and adds it to the Google search engine servers. When a user searches for something on Google, it performs relevant search results to the user, which are sourced from Google’s huge database. At Google’s backend site, it runs a series of algorithms to decide which content is best to show users. You can learn more at A Step-By-Step SEO Guide To Do SEO (Ultimate Beginner Guide)
To put it simply, when a new book is updated in the system in library system when the user uses this library system to search for the location of the book, the location will be displayed directly.
Can you understand how Google’s search engine works better now?
The above is an easy way to understand how search engines work, you can learn more about how Google’s search engine works here
It is also important to note that not all web pages will be indexed by search engines. Some pages may be blocked by robots.txt files, which prevent search engines from crawling them. Additionally, search engines may choose not to index certain pages if they determine that they are low-quality or spammy.