Category: 01. How Search Engines Work

Location Google uses your location to personalize the results for searches with local intent. That’s why all results for “italian restaurant” are from or about local restaurants. Google knows you’re unlikely to fly halfway around the world for lunch. Language Google knows there’s no point in showing English results to Spanish users. That’s why it ranks…

Discovering, crawling, and indexing content only make up the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search algorithms. What are search algorithms? Search algorithms are formulas that match and rank relevant results from the index. Google…

Each search engine has its own process for building a search index. Below is a simplified version of the process Google uses. Let’s break it down. URLs Everything begins with a known list of URLs. Google discovers these in many ways, but the three most common are:  Crawling Crawling is where a computer bot called a…

What are search engines? Search engines are searchable databases of web content. They’re made up of two main parts:  What is the aim of search engines? Every search engine aims to provide the best, most relevant results for users. That’s partly how they gain market share. How do search engines make money? Search engines have two types…