The desire to appear on the first pages of search engines has dominated the concerns of the owners of companies and commercial establishments during the recent period, especially after many depend on marketing and sales through e-marketing, and here appears the importance of knowing how search engines work because it is the basis for the ability to properly and effectively configure your site for search engines.

Google is the most popular and used search engine in the world. It processes billions of inquiries with its algorithms, which gives importance to knowing how search engines work; so that we can achieve the best results with them.

No one denies that Google was and remains the most visited site on the Internet; which makes its strong impact on the growth of trade and the practice spread of culture; so marketers strive to list their sites on the Google SERPs because that means more traffic.

The 3 stages highlight how search engines work

1- Crawling

During this stage, a process occurs through smart computer programs called “Spiders, bot, Crawlers”; whereby search engine spiders browse every page within your website; in order to collect data on it and index it in the search engine’s database.

It also monitors new sites and pages and understands the updates that take place on existing sites and pages, and search engine spiders rely on links mainly to move from one page to another.

Spiders depend on the process of crawling on the links of pages in the database and then moving to the links; of the newly created pages, and search engine spiders can understand web pages from the code used as HTML.

2- Indexing

The process in which the data collected through the crawling stage is stored, and every web page is archived according to the type of content it contains; the search engine database includes an index of billions of web pages, videos, images, and documents.

Actually, not all web pages are saved to the database of search engines, but certain portions of the content of each web page are saved; as each web page is linked to the words that are used in the search results next; for many, indexing and crawling is one process, because their work is intertwined and intertwined.

3- Ranking

The final step in the work of search engines, during which results appear to the user according to the search words; that come from the database that was collected during the indexing phase.

It does not take much time for search results to appear on Google as they appear in less than one second; Search engines have huge databases around the world; run by a group of huge, high-speed machines.

In order to understand how search engines work, we must have knowledge of the mechanism; by which search results are ranked, as this process is subject to pre-set algorithms based on factors and criteria called Rank Factors.

What are the Ranking Factors?

A set of criteria and factors set by search engine operators; to indicate the relevance and quality of each webpage to appear in the search results for a specific search term; and in what order the page appears.

Other factors of how search engines work

Pay attention to voice search, and the use of smartphone devices. And the search history of each user, in addition to the quality; because after determining the most appropriate results for the user of the search engine; comes a quality standard that determines the correct order of these results.

The quality criterion plays a large and important role in obtaining user satisfaction, as it determines the popularity of the web page and confidence to a large extent in shaping the concept of quality.