ELI5: how search engines work
// explanation
What is a search engine?
A search engine is like a giant librarian that reads almost every page on the internet and remembers what's on each one [2][4]. When you ask it a question, it looks through all those pages it memorized and shows you the ones that match best [5].
How does it find all those pages?
Search engines use special robot programs called "crawlers" or "bots" that travel from website to website, reading every page they can find [3][4]. These bots keep a list of everything they read, kind of like taking notes in a notebook [1].
What happens when you search?
When you type words into Google, it doesn't search the real internet—it searches its own giant notebook of all the pages it already read [2]. It looks for pages that have your words in them, and puts the most important-sounding pages at the top [5].
Why does one page show up before another?
Search engines try to guess which pages are the best answers by looking at how many important words match your search and how important the page seems to be overall [5].
// sources
Googlebot uses an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google's crawlers are also ...
May 5, 2020 ... Search engines don't search the internet, they search their own internal data source, they have some programs that look at all the pages and then put a ...
Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages using their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly referred to as search engine bots ...
Apr 3, 2024 ... Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of web pages, indexing them, and serving them to you.
Apr 19, 2012 ... The search engine basically tries to see if the words from your search are among the important words in a webpage. The more that is so, the better a page is ...
Video by Tim O'Keefe (Coach T)
Video by CTRL-F: Digital Media Literacy
Video by CodeAI
