Our day begins with searching for something on a search engine. A search engine is a program designed to pick out relevant information from millions of web pages across the web for a specific search query.
Search Engines are not necessarily internet browsers. The type of search engine which we use every day is the Internet Search Engine. This resides on the World Wide Web such as Google. Search Engines help users who have a specific problem to solve or a query with relevant results.
There’s a myth that Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Brave are the only possibly known search engines to people. But these are publicly accessible internet search engines.
To a surprise, search engines are built-in platforms where you can perform a search for something related to the niche such as YouTube and Amazon. But, in this article, I will be talking about Internet Search Engines.
What’s The Purpose Of Search Engines and How Do They Work?
Search Engines have evolved over the years, but the fundamentals have remained the same.
Search Engines like Google, crawl websites for content that provides relevant results to their users with a complex algorithm that is updated every day.
The purpose of search engines is simply to provide quality results to the users that will solve people’s problems instantaneously. The more relevant and authoritative a website is, the greater the chance of ranking in the top 10 of the Search Engine Results Page of Google.
Here are the 4 factors that influence the working of search engines:
Crawling
Crawling refers when search engines’ mini-programs known as spiders or bots that constantly find and crawl websites’ content and links pointing towards them. Every time a search engine crawls a website it stores a cache version of it. SEOs like us can use robots.txt to include and exclude the pages you want to get crawled.
Indexing
After a website is crawled, it is indexed. A website’s information is organized and stored in an index that contains various pages similar to the content behind a textbook. Indexing has been a problem lately and this is one of the crucial factors to rank a page on Google.
Search
We all have searched for something on Google’s search bar. Whenever you search for some keyword or question on Google it translates to the code that has been indexed. Google uses Natural Language Process (NLP) technology that analyses what the user is actually searching for and the intent behind it.
Upon searching, you may see spelling corrections, suggested keywords, and relevant results even with improper searches and that’s the power of NLP.
Ranking
Search Engines like Google, and Bing hold the responsibility of providing the best results to users’ queries on the web. For instance, if you search for “Pizza” you may find results relating to pizza restaurants, pizza recipes, best pizza locations, etc.
These are generalized results that Google thinks users want to see for a broader term like this.
Types of Search Engines
Search Engines, whenever this term strikes anyone of our minds, we think about Google and Bing. But there are 4 types of search engines across the web, that you will know now:
Popular Search Engines
Popular Search Engines can be Google and Bing. These mainstream search engines are free to use and revenue from ads. All perform the same set of actions such as crawl, index, search, and ranking as discussed before.
Here are the most popular search engines
Google was founded in the year 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with the vision to organize the world’s information on the web and make it universally accessible to everyone.Google constitutes almost 86% of the search market share and almost 94% of the mobile search traffic.
Bing
As of June 2022, Bing constitutes almost 8% of the search market and is the second biggest search engine in the world. Bing looks similar to Google in terms of UI and features but differs from Google’s EAT and Page Rank Algorithm. According to Search Engine Journal, Bing is more inclined toward On-Page Optimization and Social Signals for rankings.
Baidu
If you aren’t familiar Baidu is the largest search engine in China. It occupies around 75% of the search engine market in China. Baidu is available in the Chinese languages but can be accessed in English with a change in the settings. It looks familiar to Google and Bing with white background and blue links but cannot be accessed by everybody outside China unless you are using a strong VPN.
Yandex
Yandex is the most used search engine in Russia. It constitutes about 49% of the search market in Russia. Yandex is similar to Google with features such as white background, blue links, images, videos, news, mail, translate, and ads.
Private Search Engines
With the common practices of selling personal data by large corporations and VPN bans in various countries. Private Search Engines have gained popularity in the last decade such as Duck Duck Go. Such Search Engines are completely secure and operate with a minimal fee from customers.
Specialized Search Engines
These search engines can also be said to be Niche Relevant Search Engines. Such search engines are narrowed down to a category or platform. The examples could be:
Search Bar on shopping websites such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, etc.Quora to get answers to your questions from real experts on a certain subject.Reddit to search for subreddits and opinions on a topic from people all around the world.
Computational Search Engines
Brainly could be an example of a computational search engine wherein people look out for answers relating to math, and science.
How Do Search Engines Rank Websites?
Have you published some pages on your website and seen no rankings after so many efforts. It is because there are a few important ranking factors that Google considers vital.According to Backlinko, there are over 200 ranking factors that influence the ranking of web pages on Google.
Here are 3 ranking factors that have remained consistent for many years:
Keywords
Effective Keyword Research always plays a vital role in ranking content. You have to optimize your pages for the right keywords you are targeting. For instance, you cannot rank for SEO Company in India by targeting the keyword SEO Company New York. Along with this, it’s important to put the right keywords in the right places such as title tag, meta description, beginning, and the end of a page.
Content
The content on your web pages must match the search intent the user has along with solving problems. The content length and depth matter a lot.
Backlinks
Backlinks are considered the other half of ranking websites. Backlinks from relevant and high authority websites have a positive impact on rankings.