The Internet is a very wide world and an important source of information and data, and it almost becomes the only source at all, due to the ease of access to information through it, thanks to the search engines.
Of course, you can use other ways to search, such as writing the link to the site or page in case you memorize it, which may be impossible sometimes with this huge number of links and their long and complex names.
But if you do not know the full link, here you may need to navigate between several sites to find exactly what you are looking for, or you can shorten the time and effort by resorting to search engines.
Search engines such as Google or Bing are your gateway to the Internet, as they collect huge amounts of information available on websites and then separate and arrange it and make decisions about the most appropriate information to answer a particular query.
How do I use search engines to find information online?
Before you do a search using Google or other search engines, think a little about the words you use, because they affect the search results a lot.
If you use a small number of words, you may be surprised to see a huge amount of information, but if you use long sentences, you may not get any result at all.
What to do then?
Well, when you want to find the answer to a specific question, such as: “What are the best universities around the world?”, think of keywords.
Of course, you can type the whole sentence into the search engine, but the search engine will likely ignore some of the second words, such as conjunctions and questions.
You can then save yourself time and effort and just write the keywords: “best”, “universities” and “world”. You will get the same result! Now you may be wondering, how is that?
This leads us to talk about the principle of work of search engines.
How do search engines work?
The work of different search engines has three main functions:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
Below is a detailed explanation of each of the previous functions:
Crawling
We can say that crawling is the process of exploration in search engines, where these engines send teams of bots to find new or updated content.
These bots are nothing but computer programs that surf the World Wide Web in an organized and systematic manner.
They are called by other names such as:
- Web Crawlers or Web Crawlers.
- Web spiders.
- Network Mechanisms Bots.
How do bots discover new content?
The content takes different forms, it may be a web page, an image, a video, a PDF file, or others, but they are all discovered by the crawlers via the URL link. How is that?
Take Google, for example:
Google bots start by visiting a few web pages, then explore all the internal and external links on those pages, go to new pages, do what they did the first time, and so on until the discovery network expands Any new content is found.
During this process of moving between links and pages, the Google bot takes a copy of the link of each page it visits, and thus the content is collected and added to the Google index known as Caffeine.
Indexing
After finding the new content, search engines process this content and arrange it in a special index, which is a huge database of links discovered during the crawl process, which is referenced later to extract a suitable link that answers the searcher's query for a specific thing on the search engine.
How exactly are links indexed?
During the indexing process, the search engine tries to understand the content of the pages that were found, as it analyzes them and classifies images, videos, and other forms of content based on many factors and algorithms, and then this content is stored in a huge database stored in a huge number of computers.
Ranking
When someone performs a search on the Internet, search engines go back to their index and choose the links that are most relevant to the searcher's query, then rank and display them for the search in the hope of providing an appropriate answer.
This process of ranking content according to how it relates to the query in question is called ranking. The higher the site's rank, the more likely it will answer the query or inquiry. This is why the first site that appears on the search results page is often the best.
Why should you care about how search engines work?
Knowing how search engines work not only helps you do a better search on the Internet by choosing the right words and evaluating the results presented to you, but it also plays an essential role in how you build your website.
Here, you must know that, in order for your site to appear in search results, it must first be visible to search engines.
This is the most important part of the SEO process: if your site is not visible, you will not be able in any way to appear in the SERPs.
If web pages are not built in a way that web engines can understand and index, then their presence on the Internet and their absence are the same.
Make sure your website is well configured for search engines to discover, index, and rank, which is exactly what the science of SEO is all about.
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