Search engines quickly find information related to the words you type in from pre-indexed web pages. Page ranking algorithms are used to place important webpages at the top, and various techniques are used to optimize search results to increase user satisfaction.
The internet is exploding in size every year, and it’s estimated that by 2024, search engines will have found nearly 70 billion web pages. This was unimaginable just a few years ago. In addition to the number of websites, the amount of data generated over the internet is growing rapidly every day. This is because information and content from all over the world is being uploaded to the web in real time, and with advances in artificial intelligence technology, the ability to automatically generate and manage data is becoming more advanced, so the size of the internet is expected to grow exponentially in the future.
Google, the world’s most popular search engine, operates millions of servers and processes trillions of search requests every day. For Google, if a search fails to return results in less than a second, it is considered a significant loss of user satisfaction. When we click on a news article on the internet, it often takes more than a second for the article to appear. If opening a single webpage takes several seconds, how do search engines find what we’re looking for in less than a second out of billions of webpages? Let’s take a look at how search works.
There’s a trick. When you do a search, search engines don’t search the internet for webpages, they search an index of webpages they’ve prepared in advance. Searching is all about showing you webpages that contain the words you’ve typed. If you want to find a page in a book that contains the word “Google”, it would take you a long time to flip through the book from the first page to the last to see if it contains the word “Google” or not. But imagine looking for “google” in the book’s index, where you can find “google” in the alphabetized words, and that will lead you to the page containing “google.” It will take much less time. Similarly, when searching on the Internet, you can search much faster if you already have an index of webpages’ Internet addresses by word.
However, indexing is not enough. For example, if a user searches for the word “dumplings” and the results are filled with pages that have nothing to do with the definition or recipe of dumplings, the user will be frustrated. This would be a problem if search engines simply showed results based on the “query” alone. That’s why search engines use a method called the Page Rank algorithm to evaluate the importance of pages and try to show you the most useful results first.
The main purpose of search engines is to find the most relevant web pages that contain the words you type and place them at the top. To do this, search engines constantly analyze user behavior data for specific keywords. For example, if a user frequently searches for a dumpling recipe and spends a certain amount of time on that search result, the page is more likely to rank higher in subsequent searches. In doing so, search engines try to understand the user’s intent and deliver results based on more than just word matching, but also the quality of the page, user satisfaction, and more.
The most popular method used to determine the order in which webpages are displayed is the Page Rank algorithm. The simple explanation of this algorithm is that the more webpages people want to see, the more important they are. If webpages aren’t people, how can they want to show other webpages? The answer is links. When you click a link on a webpage, you go to that webpage and see that webpage, so when one webpage links to another webpage, it’s the same as saying that one webpage wants to show the other webpage. So, a webpage that gets a lot of links is a webpage that a lot of webpages want to show. Since webpages are written by humans, page ranking algorithms can be used to order them so that pages that many people want to see are displayed at the top of the search results. When we say people want to see it, it’s not unlike saying people like it. Page ranking algorithms have been around since Google was founded, and they play a key role in determining the order in which web pages are displayed.
As you can see, search engines use a lot of technology and algorithms to quickly and accurately deliver the vast amount of information on the internet. In doing so, they’re also utilizing the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to get better and better at what they do. In recent years, new ways of searching, such as voice search and image search, have also been introduced, further diversifying the user experience. It’s exciting to see how advances in search technology are changing the way we use the internet and what innovative ways to search will emerge in the future.
So there you have it, a simple explanation of how search engines work to find the pages we want among the many webpages on the internet. They use indexes to quickly find webpages that contain our search terms, and page ranking algorithms to display webpages in an order that satisfies the most people. Of course, these are not the only two methods used in the search process. If this article has piqued your interest in the search process, why not do some research of your own?
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