SEM

What Are Search Engines?

Search engines are designed to carry out systematic online searches and deliver the best possible results based on the users’ search queries. As a business owner, your goal is to ensure search engines can find your website so that it shows up and ranks high in relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engines have three significant functions:

1. Crawl
Search engines use their own web crawlers or search engine spiders to scour billions of pages on the internet and find new and updated content, such as web pages, videos, PDF files, and images. Search engine spiders fetch a few websites and follow the links on these pages to find new URLs.

2. Index
In this phase, search engines store and organize the content based on the keywords, data, recency, and user engagement. The new URLs found in the crawling process are indexed in a massive database called Caffeine to be retrieved when the content on the URL matches an online user’s search query.

3. Rank
Search engines categorize web pages and rank them based on relevance to provide the most useful search results to online users. The higher your website ranks on SERPs, the greater your search visibility and significance to the query.

Numerous search engines on the market are set as a default with web browsers. These include Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Swisscows, CC Search, StartPage and Search Encrypt. Here’s a closer look at the search engine market share worldwide: