How Search Engine Work

Although every search engine works in a slightly different way and has its own method of ordering pages, the basics are the same across all search engines.

Crawlers (or spiders or robots — it’s all the same) trawl the Web, read the pages they find and follow the links to reach other pages on the site. Details of each page are then sent back to the engine’s “index.” You can think of this as a giant photo album containing snapshots of billions of Web pages.

Depending on the search engine, the crawlers revisit each site about once every month or two. It can take a while then for a new page to be trawled or for a change to a page to register. (Sometimes, refreshing the page in your browser can bring it back faster; it’s worth a try!