There was a time when the internet wasn’t as popular as it is today. There were fewer search engines compared to present times. All you need to do to rank is to stuff a lot of keywords. This made your website outrank your competitors. But today, there’s more for you, from how times have changed to the basics of search engine you may not have gone deep into.
Today, the most popular search engine with the largest share of the market is Google. It introduced algorithms and web crawlers that refine all the information available on the internet and rank websites accordingly.
One of the most important and prominent practices to rank on search engines like Google is to implement SEO on websites. Through SEO one can gain visibility, traffic as well as sales. But with pros, come cons. People know what SEO is, but they don’t know how it works and how important it is for their website.
But today, instead of SEO, we’ll talk about the basics of search engines, how they work, how users interact with search engines and all the relevant processes. So, get ready to learn all the basics you’ve missed to skip to just reach the SEO.
What Is A Search Engine
Search engines are a service that has all the information present on the internet and helps in finding relevant information users are searching for. Google, as a search engine, has been at the top for such a long time that people have started using “Google” as a verb rather than a noun.
Search engines have always made our lives easier in many ways. Some of them are –
- Finding all the information within seconds that the user wants with accuracy and relevancy.
- They’ve helped the businesses grow by giving them visibility and traffic.
- Search engines provide ad spaces to brands and businesses and help in sales as well as quick visibility.
Search engines will keep making our lives easier by getting more advanced and more accurate with time. They already provide high-quality information, additionally, they are improving the algorithms to excel and improve more.
How Do Search Engines Work
Search engines use various algorithms and factors to rank websites on Search Engine Results pages (SERPs). But, 3 main functions are used to rank websites i.e.,
Crawling
Search engines have spider-like robots that are called crawlers. Whenever a user puts their query in the search bar, these crawlers search through the internet and look for new content, then analyze the codes and find content for every URL.
Indexing
After crawling has been done, all the data and content that is found is stored and organized according to the relevancy of the user query to appear in the search results.
Ranking
Search engines have various algorithms like quality of the content, difficulty level, and relevancy to rank them on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). According to the quality of the content, web pages are ranked from most relevant to least relevant order.
Whenever a user searches for something they want to know about and puts their query in the search bar, these processes take place to provide the user with the best and most relevant results.
RankBrain
It is the most important and prioritized algorithm of Google that takes the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to predict and learn how users interact with the search results provided by search engines according to their previous activities.
It’s a part of Google’s Core algorithm. It continuously tries to improve its predictions by observing the user response, and the existing data and tries to give better results for every query of the user.
The interesting part is, that whenever it notices a URL that is low ranking but provides better quality and lots of value than the high-ranking URL, then it edits the search results accordingly and puts the better URL on the top.
Wrap-up!
A short guide with a simple explanation can help you understand it better and move forward. If you’re starting out and want to understand search engines, it is a must to know the basics before you go ahead. Here, we’ve described what search engines are and how they work. This will be helpful in understanding the basics and move forward quickly.
