Working of Search Engines

Search Engines have gained significant importance over a last decade. Recent technology of ‘Search Engine Optimization’ has grown crossing all limits, even some of the software companies are earning their lively hood through the technique of Search Engine Optimization. There are many search engines among which the popular ones are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google search engine has gained much popularity and a few has a feeling that Google is the alternate name of Search Engines. Have you ever given thought how do search engine works? How do they search a query you enter and give results? Do search engines have any special mechanism based on which they work? An attempt to answer such questions is done through this blog.

Whenever you a give a query in search engine it will display a set of results with the words matching your query. Basically and broadly search engines woks in three stages such as

• Crawling with Searchbots
• Indexing key words
• Executing query

Crawling with Searchbots:

Searchbots are similar to search robots whose work is to crawl or search though the web pages. Whenever anyone updates their websites with any information, these dedicated search robots will crawl through the web pages making a note of important key words and returns the results to the web server, in turn webservers stores such keywords.

Indexing Keywords:

The keywords which are returned from crawling searchbots will be stored in the webservers which are dedicated for this purpose owned by the Search Engine owner companies such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. There will be several webservers which will be running parallel storing the address of returned keywords. The addresses f keywords are stored in webservers and the process is called indexing keywords as it creates an index of keywords in webservers.

Executing Query:

Whenever any user enters a query, the search engine will search the indexed pages for the similar keywords as that of user entered query if found will be returned as the result. There are many ways in which webserver indices work, it will first search for the exact keyword as that of user entered one, if not found it will fetch almost similar document which has maximum user entered keywords. While fetching the result, the search engine gives the link to the original document on which the query is found.

The process of search engine may look simple but it has lot of mathematical algorithms running at the back – end to fetch the result in fraction of seconds. Different search engines work on different Algorithms for executing the queries.

Google, the company which made a difference starting from its inception was mentored by an Indian born Computer Scientist Late Professor Rajeev Motwani in its initial days. In his honour Google has created Rajeev Motwani memorial Professorship at the University of Stanford where Dr Motwani was a much respected Professor.