What are Search Engines?

Search engines are the software program that provides information according to the user query. It finds various websites or web pages that are available on the internet and gives related results according to the search. To rank well on a Search Engine, it's important to know What are Search engines and how they work.

What are Search engines?

Search engines are programs that allow users to search and retrieve information from the vast amount of content available on the internet. They use algorithms to index and rank web pages based on relevance to a user's query, providing a list of results for users to explore. Popular search engines include Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

For example: a student wants to learn C++ language so he searches the "C++ tutorial GeeksforGeeks" in the search engine. So the student gets a list of links that contain the tutorial links of GeeksforGeeks or we can say that a search engine is an internet-based software program whose main task is to collect a large amount of data or information about what is on the internet, then categorize the data or information and then help user to find the required information from the categorized information. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the most popular Search Engines. 

How do Search Engines Work?

Since we know "What are Search Engine?" Now let's have a closer look at the elements involved in its working:

Search engines are generally work on three parts that are Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

1. Crawling: Search engines have a number of computer programs that are responsible for finding information that is publicly available on the internet. The crawler scans the web and creates a list of all available websites. Then they visit each website and by reading HTML code they try to understand the structure of the page, the type of the content, the meaning of the content, and when it was created or updated. Why crawling is important? Your first concern when optimizing your website for search engines is to make sure that they can access it correctly. If crawler cannot find your content you won't get any ranking or search engine traffic.

2. Indexing: Information identified by the crawler needs to be organized, Sorted, and Stored so that it can be processed later by the ranking algorithm. Search engines don't store all the information in your index, but they keep things like the Title and description of the page, The type of content, Associated keywords Number of incoming and outgoing links, and a lot of other parameters that are needed by the ranking algorithm. Why indexing is important? Because if your website is not in their index it will not appear for any searches this also means that if you have any pages indexed you have more chances of appearing in the search results for a related query.

3. Ranking: Ranking is the position by which your website is listed in any Search Engine. There is following three steps in which how ranking works .

• Step 1: Analyze user query - This step is to understand what kind of information the user is looking for. To do that analyze the user's query by breaking it down into a number of meaningful keywords. A keyword is a word that has a specific meaning and purpose, for example when you type how to make a chocolate cupcake search engines know that you are looking for specific information so the results will contain recipes and step-by-step instructions. They can also understand the meaning of how to change a light bulb is the same as how to replace a light bulb search engines are clever enough to interpret spelling mistakes also.
• Step 2: Finding matching pages - This step is to look into their index and find the best matching pages, for example, if you search dark wallpaper then it gives you the result of images, not text.
• Step 3: Present the results to the users - A typical search results page includes ten organic results in most cases it is enriched with other elements like paid Ads, direct answers for specific queries, etc.

Components of Search Engine

Now you might be wondering that, What is Search Engine Components. So, there three components in search engine. They are web crawler, data base, and search interface:

• Web crawler: A search engine uses multiple web crawlers to crawl through world wide web and gather information. It is basically a software which is also known bat or spider. 
• Database: The information which is gathered by web crawler by crawling through internet is stored on the database.
• Search Interface: Search interface is just an interface to the data base which is employed by the user to search through the data base.

Usage of Search Engine

Search engines have so many usages and some of them are:

• Searching for information: People use a search engine to search for any kind of information present on the internet. For example, Rohit wants to buy a mobile phone but he does not know which one is the best mobile phone. So he searches "best mobile phones in 2021" in the search engine and gets the list of best mobile phones along with their features, reviews, and prices.
• Searching images and videos: Search engines are also used to search images and videos. There are so many videos and images available on the internet in different categories like plants, animals, flowers, etc., you can search them according to your need.
• Searching location: Search engines are also used to find locations. For example, Seema is on a Goa trip but she doesn't know the location of Palolem beach. So she searches "Palolem beach" on the search engine and then the search engine gives the best route to reach Palolem beach.
• Searching people: Search engines are also used to find people on the internet around the world. 
• Shopping: Search engines are also used for shopping. Search engines optimize the pages to meet the needs of the user and give the lists of all the websites that contain the specified product according to the best price, reviews, free shipping, etc.
• Entertainment: Search engines are also used for entertainment purposes. It is used to search videos, movies, games, movie trailers, reviews of movies, social networking sites, etc. For example, Rohan wants to watch a movie named "Ram", then he searches this movie on a search engine and the search engine returns a list of links (of the websites) that contain the Ram movie.
• Education: Search engines are also used for education. With the help of search engines, people can learn anything they wanted to learn like cooking, programming languages, home decorations, etc. It is like an open school where you can learn anything for free. 

How do We Use a Search Engine?

Search engines are easy to use. There are billions of searches are performed using search engines each day. It's estimated that more than 5.6 billion searches are made per day.

For example, searching on Google, so to this simply open your web browser. Then type "www.google.com" in the search bar of your web browser and press "Enter".

Then the google search engine will open and now we are ready to search any information on the google search engine. Always remember the result returned by the search engine may not all be relevant to search because it will return search results that have the search words, they are not necessarily in the same order you typed them in. 

For example, we need to open a website named GeeksforGeeks to learn Python language. So we write "geeksforgeeks Python" in the Google search bar and press enter and you will see a list of links that will redirect you to the tutorial of Python on the GeeksforGeeks portal.

Related Article

• Understanding Search Engines
• Difference between Search Engine and Web Browser