How Do Search Engines Work?

It’s amazing how far web search has come in the past decade, and how it has changed the way our society seeks information. As often as we use search, we hardly ever consider the process behind it. We get millions of results in a split second without even thinking twice. The first thing to know is that when we perform a search, we aren’t actually searching the internet; we are searching the engine’s index of pages on the internet. Google is the largest search engine with over a trillion pages in its index. Pages are indexed by software programs called spiders. Spiders crawl the web, following links on pages and logging the pages they point to. Then they continue by following the links on those pages, logging those, and so on, until they have an index of over a trillion pages in the search engine. So, when you go to search for a certain set of keywords, Google’s software searches every indexed page for those words, returning the most relevant results first, based on many different things, such as how many times the keyword shows up in the page, where the keywords are within the text, where the website is from, and the page rank of the website. Page Rank is a patented algorithm invented by Google’s founders, which rates a webpage based on the number and quality of outside links that point to that site. After you search, all of these things are combined to return results that are most relevant to what you are looking for, hence millions of results in half of a second. It is important to understand how search works so that you can successfully optimize your site to show up in results. At TheeDigital, we build our websites with search engines in mind, creating a custom WordPress content management system (CMS) that is easily indexed by search engines. Then, our internet marketing team helps build incoming links specific for your keywords, so that you show up at the top of the results for your industry. If you are looking for help getting noticed online, call 919-341-8901 for a free consultation or fill out our inquiry form and one of our marketing specialists will be in contact with you soon.

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