Search Engine refers to a system that collects information from the Internet according to certain strategies and uses specific computer programs, organizes and processes the information, provides retrieval services to users, and displays the information related to the user’s search to the user. Search engines include full-text indexes, directory indexes, meta search engines, vertical search engines, collection search engines, portal search engines, and free link lists.
How Search Engines Work
The working principle of search engines is mysterious and profound to the outside world. In fact, the working principle of search engines is very simple. Many people mistakenly believe that the results returned by search engines are dynamic. In fact, the results returned by search engines have been captured in advance, and then put into the database after a series of algorithm screening. When users query, they immediately search the index database and feedback the user’s accurate keyword query results.
1. Collect information to form snapshots
Web page snapshot collection is the process of search engines crawling pages on the Internet through web crawlers (Spider) and storing them to form snapshots, which provides data support for search engines to carry out various tasks. In theory, if there are appropriate hyperlinks on the web page, the web crawler can traverse most web pages.
2. Organize information and create indexes
When ordinary users look at a page, they see some intuitive information such as text and pictures, but search engines look at the source code of the web page and determine the important information of the web page based on these source codes. Determining important text or words is a step in the process of search engines building web page indexes.
The process of search engines organizing information is called “building indexes”. Search engines not only need to save the collected information, but also arrange them according to certain rules. In this way, search engines can quickly find the required information without having to re-check all the information they have saved.
3. Accept query search sorting
Search engines will also expand query retrieval items based on synonyms and potential semantics. For example, sometimes search engines will treat “pets” and “dogs”, “Tibetan mastiffs” and “dogs”, “people” and “people” as the same concept. In addition, when searching, search engines will also classify them according to themes. For example, when we search for “SEO”, the system will automatically classify “Internet marketing”, “search engine optimization”, “website optimization” and the like as one theme.
Users send queries to search engines, which accept them and return information to users. Search engines receive queries from a large number of users almost simultaneously at all times. They check their indexes according to the requirements of each user, find the information users need in a very short time, and return it to the users. At present, the information returned by search engines is mainly provided in the form of web links.