How do search engines work?

Nyra Singh

Search engines play important roles on the Web, search engines help any Internet user to
rapidly find relevant information. But the unsolved problems of current search engines have
led to the development of the semantic Web.

A search engine is a program that helps people find relevant information they are looking for
online by typing keywords or phrases. Search engines are able to find results that can be
relevant for what you are looking for. When a user enters a search term, the search engine
looks at the website page titles, contents and keywords it has indexed and uses algorithms
(step-by-step operations) to produce a list of sites—with the most relevant websites at the
top of the list.
There are 3 types of search engine components which are –
1.Web crawler
2.Data Base
3.Search interfaces
A web crawler also known as spider or bots is a software component that traverses the web
to gather information.
Data base has all the information on the web, this is stored in the database. It consists of
huge web resources.
Search interfaces is an interface between user and the database. It helps the user to search
through the database.
Web crawler, database and the search interface are the major component of a search
engine that actually makes search engine to work. Search engines make use of Boolean
expression AND, OR, NOT to restrict and widen the results of a search. Following are the
steps that are performed by the search engine:
 The search engine looks for the keyword in the index for predefined database instead
of going directly to the web to search for the keyword.

 It then uses software to search for the information in the database. This software
component is known as web crawler.

 Once web crawler finds the pages, the search engine then shows the relevant web
pages as a result. These retrieved web pages generally include title of page, size of
text portion, first several sentences etc.

These search criteria may vary from one search engine to the other. The retrieved
information is ranked according to various factors such as frequency of keywords, relevancy
of information, links etc. User can click on any of the search results to open it.
 Indexing –
• The indexing process begins with web crawling where the so-called spiders crawl across
the world wide web and collect data.

• The data collected is stored in the form of a database for the process of indexing. This is
also termed as text acquisition.

• Then the collected data is broken down into tokens or keywords. These tokens are used
by the search engine in creating indexes. Each keyword is associated to a particular
document and through indexing the data becomes organized and it helps the search
engine to quickly retrieve a particular information.

Querying-

• When a user searches something on the search engine a query input is generated.

• Then the search engine parses the generated query and searches at the indexes for the
matching documents.

• Using a ranking algorithm, the search engine ranks the documents based on their
relevance. Finally, the generated list is presented to the user with most relevant results on
the top.

Search Engine Advantages-

• Search engines have made it possible to navigate through the internet. Even a person
without any technical knowledge is able to use a search engine for solving a query.
• The quick and efficient responses of search engine make it easier for a user to
immediately get result for their search.

• A search engine not only supports text results but also results like images, videos, maps,
documents and various other formats, hence offering users a one stop solution.
• In today’s time people are using search engines not only for technical purposes but also
for researches, educational purposes and even in day-to-day life because of its diversified
result generation.

• The user-friendly interface, organized results, customization features and diversity of

Examples Of Popularly Used Search Engines –

In today’s time Google is the most widely used search engine, however there are several
other popular search engines being used. Some of the popular search engines are listed
below:

• Google – Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is the most popularly
and widely used search engine. It has an attractive an user-friendly interface with a
versatile library of features which makes it first choice for maximum users when it comes to
search engines.
• Bing – Founded in 2009 by Microsoft, Bing is quite similar to other search engines. It also
allows users to search through images.

• Yahoo – Founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo was among the earliest
used search engines. However, its popularity has declined over time. Earlier Yahoo offered
a platform called “Yahoo answers” where users could ask or answer various questions.

• Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex are some other popular emerging browsers in today’s
time.

Search engines offer users vast and impressive amounts of information, available with a
speed and convenience few people could have imagined one decade ago. Their
capabilities are expanding practically by the day. Soon it will seem routine to be able to
search the contents of vast libraries of books; to find selected portions of video streams or
audio recordings; to benefit from personalized searches that remember a user’s
preferences and keep track of changing geographical locations. Audio searching and
search results will be available for the blind; “implicit searching” will anticipate users’
queries and have answers ready.

Citations-
The Research of Search Engine Based on Semantic Web. 2008, December 1. IEEE
Conference Publication

Part 7. Conclusions Pew Research Center, 2019