How Does a Search Engine Work?

The Basic Inner Workings of Search Engines

Search engines are complicated entities. Here is a basic breakdown of how search engines work to bring you the results you're looking for.

What is a search engine?

Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Please note: search engines are not simple. They include incredibly detailed processes and methodologies, and are updated all the time. This is a bare bones look at how search engines work to retrieve your search results. All search engines go by this basic process when conducting search processes, but because there are differences in search engines, there are bound to be different results depending on which engine you use.

• The searcher types a query into a search engine.
• Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find matches to this query.
• The search engine's results are ranked in order of relevancy.

Name of Search Engine Spider

Google Spider

GoogleBot

Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine.

Yahoo

Yahoo! Slurp

Yahoo! Slurp is a web crawler based on search engine technology Yahoo! acquired when it purchased Inktomi. Slurp was the web crawler for Yahoo! Search until Yahoo! contracted with Microsoft to use bingbot instead.

Bing

BingBot

BingBot is a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to supply Bing (search engine). It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine). It replaced msnbot as the main Bing Crawler on October 2010.