How Do Search Engines Work?

The ultimate goal of any search engine is to make searchers happy with the results they find.

To achieve this, search engines need to find the best pages. And serve them as the top search results.

Note: Google is not the only search engine. But it is by far the most popular one. That’s why we refer to Google most times we talk about search engines. Besides, SEO fundamentals are fairly similar across most search engines.

Google uses the following stages to find and rank content:

Crawling: Google uses “bots,” or computer programs, to crawl the web and look for new or updated pages. In order for Google to find a page, the page should have at least one link pointing to it. 

Indexing: Next, Google analyzes each page and tries to make sense of what the page is about. Then, it may store this information in the Google Index—a huge database of webpages.

Serving results: When a user enters a query, Google determines which pages are the best, in terms of both quality and relevance, and ranks them in the SERP.

how search engines work

Your job as a website owner is to help search engines crawl and index all the pages on your site that you want them to. (And none of them that you don’t.)

You can ensure the crawlability and indexability of your pages through a number of actions and best practices commonly referred to as technical SEO. 

Now that you understand how Google finds and categorizes pages, it’s time to take a closer look at how the top results are selected. And the role of SEO in this process.

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