As we all know, internet is meaningless without search engines. More than 90% of internet users use search engines to reach their destined website. But, many people don't know the fact that search engine itself is a part of a website.
The first search engine that came to use is Archie.
This search engine was implemented by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch and some other students from the McGill University which is in Montreal. Till then, many new search engines came to use and the most used one now is Google.
But, what is the basic principle behind all these search engines? Its function is not so complex but its knowledge will be a little interesting for those who are interested in knowing more about it. In this article, we will see how a search engine does its work.Working of a search engine:
A search engine has a very huge database in which it has the list of thousands of links in it which lead to various pages of the websites in the World Wide Web. So, whenever we type in a word or a phrase in the search box, it immediately starts searching its database those links which are more relevant to the input words. This only takes a fraction of a second in many search engines from which we can understand how much speed is required to create one.
But, how is the data i.e. (the list of the links from various websites) collected? For this, the search engines use a special software called Crawlers
.What are Crawlers?Crawlers
, otherwise called as Ants
are some software that are used to collect the links from all over the World Wide Web. These crawlers just crawl into each and every page of all websites and submit those links into their main database under various categories to make the search of those links easier.
Also, the links are regularly updated by the crawlers. Because, if they are not updated regularly, a small change in a website by its web-master may lead you to a broken link.
The indexing of the links stored in the database of the search engine is just like the indexing of the books in a library where the books can be searched by its title (name), by the author's name and by various other criteria.The Preferences during Search:
There are various preferences that are given while submitting a link to the users. Some of the criteria that most search engines employ include popularity, relevance of the input words or phase, usage of proper keywords in meta tag and in headings and the quality of the contents. Hence, a website that satisfies all these criteria have more probability to be listed at the top of a search engine page.
However, some links may not be available to the crawlers. In such a case, manual submission of the links to the search engine database may work. This type of submission has some disadvantages and some advantages too. The disadvantages include wastage of time and carelessly unnoticeable. The main advantage of manual search is listing out the links without proper keywords however having quality contents.
Hope this article has helped you in understanding the basics about the working of a search engine.
Thanks for reading.
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