lanfirst.me
11/09/2025
It feels almost magical if you’ve ever entered a query into Google and received a response in less than a second. In reality, however, a great deal of extremely quick and ingenious backstage work is taking place. I used to believe that when you hit Enter, search engines “searched the internet” in real time, but that isn’t actually the case. The majority of the work has already been completed before you arrive; what you are witnessing is the outcome of a process that has been underway for weeks or even months.
Crawling, indexing, and ranking are the three primary tasks that search engines perform. Although the official explanations may seem dry, once you visualize the concepts in terms of everyday life, they become quite simple to understand.
Crawling is similar to deploying incessant tiny robots—often referred to as “spiders” or “bots”—to scour the internet. They begin with a list of well-known websites, which you could consider their “address book.” They then visit those websites, click on all of the links they come across, and visit the new pages as well. It’s similar to how you can read about “volcanoes” on Wikipedia and then, after 20 clicks, find yourself on “history of the pineapple trade.” Rather than being curious, the bots simply follow links.
Not all pages receive the same amount of attention. Because they are constantly changing, news websites and large e-commerce sites are frequently crawled. An outdated blog that hasn’t been updated since 2013 may only occasionally be viewed. Using a robots.txt file, website owners can even post “Do Not Disturb” signs for bots, which essentially tell them to “not crawl this page” or “only look at these sections.” (Of course, not every bot is courteous enough to pay attention.)
The search engine needs a way to store and interpret all of this data after the bots have gathered it.
Indexing can help with that.
It reminds me of an enormous library catalog. The crawling phase is when the librarian scurries
around the city, picking up every book. Writing down each book’s title, author, and possibly a brief
synopsis helps readers find it later. This process is known as indexing.
There’s more to this than just word-saving. Because contemporary search engines aim to
comprehend context, they will presume that a page mentioning “Apple” and “iPhone” is about the
tech company rather than the fruit. To determine that, they employ artificial intelligence (AI) in the
form of natural language processing.
A page may as well not exist to a search engine if it is not indexed. Like a book in a locked back
room, no one will find it even if it’s the greatest book ever because it’s not listed in the catalog.
How search engines determine which pages appear first is the part that most people are genuinely
interested in.
The engine doesn’t look through the live web when you search for something. After searching its
index, which is that enormously structured catalog, it ranks the results according to hundreds of
criteria, or “ranking signals.” Among the larger ones are
The algorithm, or precise recipe, is a closely guarded secret that is always evolving. Google alone
makes thousands of tweaks each year. Because of this, your favorite website may appear on page
one one day and then, inexplicably, on page three the next.
It’s important to remember that the search results page, also known as the SERP, is no longer merely a collection of “ten blue links.” You’ll notice things such as
If the internet were a huge metropolis:
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that search engines aren’t always “neutral,” as people
sometimes believe. Your location, search history, and even the device you’re using can all affect the
results you see. When two people search for the same thing at the same time, they may receive
slightly different results. It’s important to keep in mind, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing because
it’s meant to make results more relevant.
To put it briefly, search engines are always searching, organizing, and sorting the internet so that
you can quickly find the answer to a question you type. Although it is quick and imperceptible to us,
the process that actually makes the internet usable runs continuously in the background.
An analogy
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