What are search engines?
A search engine is a web-based tool that helps people find the information they are looking for online. Individuals search for information on the internet by asking queries to search engines, and these queries are known as keywords and phrases. Search engines crawl millions of pages using their bots, and they find and rank the best and most highly relevant content that matches the user’s search queries. Every search engine consists of 2 primary parts.
1. Search Index: The search index is the library of webpage information. It is designed to map search queries to URLs to appear in the search results.
2. Search Algorithm: The search algorithm is a computer program that helps locate the specific data or search query from a vast data collection.
How many search engines are there?
When we discuss search engine definition, we understand that there are many alternate search engines other than Google. Few old search engines include WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, Dogpile, etc. The list of internet search engines is huge, but we are familiar with only a small search engines list that includes Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc. Each of these search engine work differently.
What are the best search engines? Obviously Google! Why? We all know and love Google for its user interface and vast data. With over 1.1 billion users every month, they’re the king of search engines. Over 350 million users a month use Bing as a search engine, making it the second-largest search engine ever.
Why do search engines exist?
Search engines aim to provide users with the best and most highly relevant search results. In theory, they maintain the market share by offering highly accurate and best search results.
How Search Engines earn with Information?
As we know, today, information is power. And who is the primary source of all sorts of information? They are search engines! So how do they convert this power of data into monetary gains? The answer is divided into 2 parts.
Organic search results: Organic search results list the ranked pages on SERPs based on their relevancy to the search query and search engine optimization.
Paid search results: Paid search results are paid ads created by businesses to appear top of the search results instantly. Digital marketers work through search engine marketing (SEM) to create, manage, and boost paid ads.
Every time a user clicks on a paid search result, the advertiser business pays the search engine. This is also called PPC or pay-per-click advertising. The revenue model of a search engine is based on acquiring more users to get more clicks on ads, and more users and revenue generation adds to the market share of a search engine. Such revenue model is essential for search engines to work efficiently towards better user experience and refined data.
Why should I care how search engines work?
If you are a digital marketer and responsible for ranking your business’s website and information in the top SERP rankings, you are reading the right article. We all leverage search engines as the best tool for search engine optimization, and we need to understand how search engines work to achieve the best SEO results. How they crawl, find, index, and rank a piece of content, how to boost your website ranking in Google and get more clicks and organic traffic to your content.
According to a Moz survey, many Google users instinctively click on the first result in Google. So, when we understand the graph of first-page position to Google organic CTR, we understand that being in the first page first position matters the most.
Source: Backlinco
How Search Engines Index the Information?
Search engines like Google have trillions of pages. But when a user searches for something on google, the relevant and best information is populated within seconds. How is it possible for a search engine like Google to go through the trillions of pages within seconds and find the best and most relevant piece of information? The answer lies in their basic simple process.
Let’s break this process into 4 major parts and understand.
URLs
Crawling
Processing & rendering
Indexing
URLs
Uniform resource locators or URLs mean the unique address of a given resource on the internet. Each URL points to a unique resource: an HTML page, a CSS document, an image, etc. Google discovers the URLs through various standard processes. The most common among them are,
Backlinks
Backlinking is one of the common practices followed by the SEO community to improve optimization. Linking your webpage to the most authoritative websites builds trust factor and boosts the value of your content. Each backlink, internal or external, helps the search engine understand the quality and relevancy of your page. You can create, monitor, and optimize your backlink profile using backlink checker tools like Google Search Console, ahrefs, etc.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps list all of the important web pages on your site. If you submit your sitemap to Google through Google Search Console, it may help them understand and discover your website faster.
URL Submissions
URL submission means manually submitting your URL to a search engine for faster indexing. You don’t need to wait for a search engine to discover and crawl your page after its creation, and you can submit the URL in Google Search Console and get it indexed.
Crawling
Crawling is a process followed by a computer bot where web crawlers called spiders to follow the links on web pages to find new content for indexing.
You must note that Google doesn’t always crawl pages in the order they discover them. Google creates a queue of URLs for crawling based on the following factors,
the PageRank of the URL
how often the URL change
whether or not it’s new
This is crucial because search engines might crawl and index some of your pages before others. If you have a big website, it could take a while for search engines to crawl it fully. But Google doesn’t crawl every URL as storing each URL in their database is not possible.
Processing
Processing is where Google focuses on extracting the key information from the crawled pages. What’s the exact procedure for processing? Nobody outside Google knows exactly. Processing includes extracting links within the content and storing the content for indexing.
Google needs to render the pages to process them completely. So, Google runs the page code to understand how it looks for users. So, processing may occur before as well as after the rendering.
Search Engine Indexing
Indexing means adding the processed information from crawled webpages to a huge database called the search index. A search index is a massive digital library of trillions of web pages ranked according to their relevancy on SERPs.
So, when a user inputs a search query in Google, they are not just searching directly for the exact matching results to their search query, but many search engines indexed web pages are based on relevancy. So that user is searching for a search index in reality. If a webpage is not available to search engines, it will not appear in the search index. This is why indexing your web pages in top searching like Google and Bing is essential.
How Search Engines Rank Webpages?
Ranking a webpage is one of the most crucial processes for a search engine optimization company. Why?
Because relevancy is subjective!
Then how do search engines like Google rank millions of pages based on relevancy? Who decides if the top-ranked pages in SERPs are the right source of information for a specific search query?
The answer lies in us. Google applies multiple parameters to understand content relevancy. Discovering, crawling, and indexing web pages is followed by ranking, and here search algorithms come to the rescue.
Each search engine has its unique ranking factors, and Google has around 200+ ranking factors in evaluating a page for ranking. Search engines build search algorithms to carry out ranking based on these factors. Let’s discuss a few of these crucial ranking factors.
Backlinks
In a 2016 live webinar, Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, was asked about the most crucial ranking factors of Google.
Since 1997, when Google introduced PageRank, links have been one of the most dominating ranking factors on Google. The formula is simple! Simply focus on the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a specific webpage.
In a recent study done by ahrefs, they found a clear correlation between the number of high authority backlinks to a page and the amount of traffic it receives from Google.
Does it all depend upon the number of backlinks to a page? No, it’s not. It’s more about quality than quantity. A page with a few high-authority backlinks can achieve a better ranking than a page with many low-authority backlinks. How to understand the quality of a backlink?
Among these 6, the two most important factors are,
Link Authority:
As we said above, backlinks from authoritative pages impact your web page ranking very positively. But what are these authoritative pages? What is the authority of search engines?
In the context of SEO, the websites with many backlinks or ‘Votes’ are the authoritative websites. Different SEO tools offer different factors to measure page or website authority.
ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR) metrics for website authority and URL Raring (UR) for page authority. Moz offers the concept of Domain Authority (DA) for websites and Page authority (PA) for webpages.
Link Relevance:
Creating backlinks by linking to other web pages will not suffice. Linking to relevant pages is extremely essential, and Google has explained how search works to understand why relevance matters the most.
To understand how search engines work, we must understand their primary goal. The primary goal of search engines is to offer information to their users, and the flow of information should be intact and relevant. So, if your webpage on pet food is linked to other high-authority websites on pet food, pet health, and pet care, then it indicates your information is of high quality.
Relevance
Relevance is the key for Google to determine page ranking, so it’s the most important factor. As per Google, the basic signal for relevance is received when a web page keyword matches the user’s search query.
But is search relevance is only about keywords?
Certainly not! It’s much more than matching a set of keywords.
When you search apple, you get to see the technology company ‘Apple,’ not the fruit. From interaction data, Google knows well that when users add ‘Apple’ as a search query, they are most possibly looking for a technology company, not fruit.
So, only the interaction data decide relevancy?
No! There are more factors in play here.
Since its inception, Google has focused on learning how relationships between common entities such as people, things, and places are built and work. Understanding these relationships are fundamental to growth and reach. The best example is ‘The Knowledge Graph.’ It is a massive database of entities and their relationships with each other.
To understand the page’s relevance, Google focuses on relationships between entities, which is why Google can go beyond basic keyword matching.
Freshness
Freshness is a query-dependant ranking factor, and it means that it matters for a specific type of result more than others.
For search queries like, “What’s new on Netflix?” freshness of content is highly important. Because the searcher is looking for the latest movie or TV show, they added on Netflix. Here Google offers higher rankings to newly-published relevant content.
Now, if we speak about queries such as ‘best mobile phones,’ the freshness matters too, as much as the above example. Every day new mobile phones with the latest technologies are launched. So, fresh content on the same is relevant. Google will not show you the 2016 page on best mobile phones today.
For some queries, freshness is irrelevant. Lets take an example – ‘How to tie a tie.’ This is much common information that hasn’t changed for years. For such queries, the freshness doesn’t matter, and Google can rank 10-year-old pages as well.
Topical Authority
Topical authority matters. For example, if you want to know about the best food, you would take the opinion of your chef friend, not that of another friend who is a doctor. But if you want to know about the best cat food, you would ask your vet friend. Right? Similarly, Google considers a specific website as the authoritative source of information over another.
In one of their patents, they said.
Whether the search system considers a site authoritative will typically be query-dependent. …the search system can consider the website for the Centers for Disease Control, “cdc.gov,” to be an authoritative website for the query “CDC mosquito stop bites.” Still, it may not consider the same site authoritative for the query “restaurant recommendations.”
For the keyword ‘Puranpoli Cooking,’ Indian Health Recipes is outranking NDTV and TimesofIndia websites. Here is, topical authority is at work. So, cultivating a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area matters for ranking.
Page Speed
Time is one of the most crucial factors in user experience. Nobody wants to wait while a page loading slowly, and Google understands it well. Google has marked page speed as the ranking factor for desktop searches in 2010 and mobile searches in 2018.
Google says that page speed is only a challenge for pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users.” So, making your website load faster than a few milliseconds will not show a magical boost in ranking.
You can check your website speed at PageSpeed Insights. Apart from the current readings, it also offers suggestions to load pages faster.
PageSpeed Insights also shows your page performance about Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are three important metrics that evaluate the loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of your web pages. Google has confirmed that Core Web Vitals will be one of the ranking signals in June 2021.
You can see the performance of all pages on your website using the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console or improve website performance through search console bubble chart.
Mobile-friendliness
Google search traffic coming from mobile phones is 65% of the total. As the users use Google from their mobile phones, Google started to focus on mobile-friendliness in 2015.
In 2019, Goggle switched to mobile-first indexing. Now it’s also a ranking factor for desktop searches. Google now focuses on the mobile version of the web pages to index and rank a certain webpage. If your website is not responsive for mobiles and not mobile-friendly, then it will affect your ranking.
How to check the mobile-friendliness of my website?
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool or the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console.
How does a search engine personalize a search result?
Search results are subjective, and Google knows different people have different preferences, and search results appeal to them differently. We have mentioned many search engines above and the major difference in how these search engines work is – personalization!
You may have observed the effect of this personalization, specifically when you have searched for the same query on multiple devices and browsers. On different devices and browsers, the same search engine shows different results.
Google states that “information such as your location, past search history, and search settings all help [us] to tailor your results to what is most useful and relevant for you at that moment.”
Let’s understand this closely.
Location
If you search for ‘pizza,’ you get the location-specific results of pizza-serving restaurants near you.
This is how Google leverage your location to personalize the results for you. If you search Pizza while in NY, you will see different pizza-serving restaurants ranking.
After scrolling, we get to see search results, including TripAdvisor, are personalized to your location.
Your location affects results for local queries so dramatically that there’s virtually no overlap when searching for the same thing from two different locations.
Language
Language is a crucial factor in receiving information. Showing results in the German language will not be helpful to English searchers and vice-versa. Google relies on website owners for this. If your website has pages in multiple languages, Google may not realize that’s the case unless you tell them.
You can do this with an HTML attribute called hreflang.
hreflang is a small piece of code indicating the relationship between multiple versions of the same page in different languages.
Search History
Perhaps the most obvious measure of Google using search history to personalize search results is when it ‘ranks’ a formerly clicked result higher the next time you run the same search.
It doesn’t always happen, but it appears to be quite common—especially if you click or visit the web page multiple times in a short period.
Concluding How Search Engines Work
Search Engine Optimization has two major stakeholders. They are the people and search engine bots. We do SEO for not only users but also for web crawlers and vice versa. So, understanding how search engines work is important to learning to do effective search engine optimization. Our beginner’s Guide to SEO in 2022 helps SEO community to understand the knacks of current SEO concepts easily.
A search engine is a tool, and we understand this tool in and out. It is the first step to getting traffic and reaching out to the users. Search engines like Google are continuously upgrading themselves to offer the best results. As SEOs, we should stay updated on all the changes and stay one step ahead.
