How Do Search Engines Work?
Before we answer this question, it may be helpful to back up and answer another question. What is a search engine? In 2020, it was estimated the amount of data on the internet would reach 40 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. Over 50 billion devices are connected to the internet with over 4.5 billion users around the world. And those numbers are growing every year.
What is a search engine
To make sense of all that data, we rely on search engines. A search engine is a web-based program. It uses its own proprietary logic or problem-solving operations (called an algorithm). It finds content on the internet and scans it (or crawls with robots). It processes and categorizes that information (called indexing). And, delivers to us the best matches (a search engine results page) based on what we ask (using keywords).
If it helps, think of it this way. Search engines exist to give the best answers to any question in the biggest library on the planet. Search engines scan millions of pages per day and feed all that data (words, images, videos, etc.) back to the engine. It then analyzes it to understand and categorize it. Then it can deliver that information back to the user when asked. Google uses a combination of separate algorithms and ranking signals to decide the best results.
Questions people ask!
People ask three general type of questions within search engines:
WHAT - the user is seeking factual information like “what is _________”
WHERE - the user is seeking a specific site or destination like your brand or product name.
WANT - the user wants to purchase something like “buy _________ near me”
You can imagine how sophisticated search engines must be to understand the intent of these searches. The more words (keywords) the user puts into the search, the more relevant the results will be. Search engines are becoming very smart. One of Google’s algorithms (called BERT) processes all the words in relation to each other instead of one by one. Sounds a bit human doesn’t it?
How to help my site get found and understood by search engines
Anyone who creates a website, wants that site to be found by the user. So, how does a search engine know about the page and what is on it? After a website is published, search engines eventually find it and scan it. Given the immense amount of data on the web, that doesn’t happen right away. It can take days to weeks for the search engines to find the site. The owner of the site can ask the search engine directly to scan it. The creator of the site can also do a few things to help the search engine find it, scan it, and understand it. This is called search engine optimization (or SEO).
Our biggest goal should be to engineer our sites and content to be findable and useful when the customer asks. Author Heather Lutze calls this “findability.” SEO techniques help search engines know more about your site. We are helping it assess if our content is useful to the user.
How does Google know what to show
Remember, the goal of the search engine is to deliver the best results to the user. Search engines use several factors to assess-rate-rank the quality of a site and its content. It rates based on things like how close the content it matches the keywords used. It uses things like how many other sites want to link to it (backlinks). It considers the volume of content. Are there a lot of useful things to scan as potential answers to questions? It also considers how many people visit the site (click-through rate).
It uses all those signals in combination to rank the site. The higher the rank of the site for that search, the higher it appears in the results. Only the top 10 results appear on page 1. You can also pay search engines money to appear at the top.
