What is Search Engine ? How Search Engine works ?

What is Search Engine?

Today in my blog, I will be discussing about a frequently heard term called “Search Engine” and discuss on how I came across this term “Search Engine” & my experience and understanding about it.

I still remember when I was in 5^th grade - that’s when I heard my close friend telling me that she is going to a nearby cyber café to check some science related project details in Googly along with her brother. She said, she’ll get all the information from Googly (ha ha, that’s how I first heard the term Google).

Later on we started continuously going to browsing center to get information from Google (not from Googly ;) ) to fill our chart papers with different images & content for the projects . Only we grew up, but our source of getting information remained the same & to say, we have now become more dependent on Google, Bing, Yahoo ( Yahoo was used more back in the year 2001 ) than ever before.

One fine day, I googled on the topic “What is Google ? “ and that’s how I first came across the term “Search Engine”.

Like every one of you, even I had a big question in my mind - What is Search Engine? Why do they call it a Search Engine? What is it all about? How does it get all the information? Is there anyone serving information to Search Engine in the web as the servers serve food to people in the restaurants? So these questions, made me do a thorough research on Search Engines through various sources online and I gathered loads of information about them. That is when, I thought, if I could write a blog on Search Engines which can serve as an initial source to anyone who is willing to dive into the world of Search Engines and Internet Marketing. 

Figure below shows Search Engine Examples

Fig 1: Popular Search Engines Google, Yahoo.

According to Wikipedia, Search Engine is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.

Did you understand anything from the above definition? If your answer is - yes, that’s great. If not, don’t worry, I will try to make it simpler for you.

Technically speaking, Search Engine is a web application which helps you in gathering relevant information for the keyword, (For Example: Best Italian Restaurants in and around Indiranagar)  that you enter in the search box, by searching the complete web and in turn giving you the results in the form of website links within no seconds.

According to the recent statistics of the year of 2016, Google leads the Search Engine Market by grabbing the 90% of the search traffic.

Having mentioned that, it is important to know there are different types of Search Engine. Google falls under the first category - Crawler based Search Engine.

Types of Search Engine

i) Crawler based search engines - uses search engine bot for crawling and indexing (which is explained in detail below)
ii) Human Directories - uses human efforts for listing.
iii) Hybrid Search Engines are combination of both Crawler based search engines and Human Directories.

But how does Search Engine gives us the results so fast. Here you will know :

How does the Search Engine Work ?

 Search Engine incorporates three step procedures in getting the required information in microseconds to you:

1)      Crawling – Through an automated process called as bot or spider, the raw data is collected and linked from one web page to another by following the links on the web pages. These data are stored with an index in huge servers. Every time there is a new content available the spider crawls through the data to store it in the server. So billions & billions of pages of data are stored in the huge servers.

2)      Indexing – The bot or the very famous spider, searches all the indexes, based on the search query (the one you put on the search box). In this process, hundreds & thousands of related web pages are listed. But, how does Google decide on which web pages are the users exactly looking for? Yes, that’s done with the help of Algorithm.

3)      Algorithm – There are more than 200 SEO factors based on which the algorithm makes a quick decision on listing the appropriate web pages to the users corresponding to their keyword search. Few factors like - How many times the search keywords have been used, What is the rank of the page (Famously called as Page Rank which is declared obsolete but it is internally calculated) etc. , the algorithm will decide the quality of the web page and rank them in the results page.

If you feel the above discussion became too technical for you to understand, then, let me make it simpler with an analogy.

What happens, when you type a query say “Online Digital Marketing courses” on to your Google search box and hit Enter key?

1)      The Google bot would have already crawled the web pages related to “Digital Marketing courses” and stored it in its huge servers. For this to happen, the website owners should have already submitted their website links to Google through Google Webmasters.

2)      The bot searches all the entries (Technically called Google Index) in the server, to find the web pages related to your search query i.e., “Online Digital Marketing courses” and comes up with thousands of web pages related to it.

3)      Finally the algorithm, based on SEO factors, decides about the list of web pages that are more relevant to search query and gives you a list of web links in the Search Engine Result Page. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – is the web page that displays the final results of your search query.

I hope you I could give some clarity on what is search engine and how it works. Thank you for reading my blog.