Search engines have a couple of critical operations that they complete in order to provide search engine results that are relevant when a searcher uses the search engine to locate specific information. These engines are responsible for crawling the web, indexing documents, processing queries and ranking results. Understanding how these engines work is certainly the right way to get the most out of search engines and search engine optimization. Crawling the Web - These engines run an automated program known as bots or spiders that crawl all of the documents and pages that make up websites online. Estimates are that there are currently approximately 20 billion web pages online, and of them, between 8 and 10 billion have been crawled and spidered by search engines so far. Indexing Documents - Once the web page has been crawled, the contents of that web page is now indexed. What this means is that the contents of the page are stored in a huge database making up the index for the search engine. This is a tightly managed index, and this makes it possible for the requests that sort and search through billions of documents are capable of being completed in a matter of fractions of seconds. Processing Queries - Once a request for certain information is passed to the search engine, and millions of these requests are made every day, the engine will retrieve all of the matching documents from its index. A match is going to be determined if the phrase or terms being searched for are found on the website or web page in a relevant way. There are many of different ways that queries can be made on these engines, depending on what it is that the user is actually looking for. Queries can be put in quotes for the exact keyword matches, or made normally in order to match the keywords but not necessarily exactly. The web pages that are returned based on the search query are web pages on the internet that utilize the queried keywords or keyword phrases. Ranking Results - Once a search engine has been able to determine which web pages in the index are a match to the query, the search engine algorithms, which are mathematical equations used for the purpose of sorting, run calculations on all of the results to determine which results are going to be the most relevant for the query given. The results are then sorted on the results page and ordered from those that are the most relevant to those that are the least relevant, allowing users of the search engine to make choices about the pages that they visit. Although the operations of a search engine are not all together very lengthy, the systems used in search engines like Google and Yahoo are quite complex and processing intensive as they have to manage millions of different calculations in order to provide users with the results of their search queries.
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