How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
The internet is a vast expanse of information, with millions of websites containing knowledge on every conceivable topic. Navigating this digital ocean without a map would be an impossible task. This is where search engines come in, acting as modern-day cartographers, creating a map of the internet’s content. They allow us to find the information we need among the endless sea of data. But how do these search engines manage to find and organize the internet’s vast resources? The process involves three key steps: crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Crawling: The Discovery Phase
The first step in a search engine’s process is known as crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, to discover new and updated content. These crawlers start with a list of web page URLs from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. As they visit these web pages, they use the links contained within them to discover additional pages.
Crawlers look at webpages much like you would when browsing the internet, but instead of reading the content, they’re analyzing the webpage’s code to understand the structure, content, and links. The goal of crawling is to understand what each webpage is about and how it is connected to other pages on the internet. This continuous…
