Technology
How do search engines work?
Search engines work in three steps: crawling the web with bots to discover pages, indexing their content in a giant database, and ranking results by relevance and quality when you search — returning answers in milliseconds.
See it in motion.
Watch a 2-minute animated lesson that shows exactly how search engines works.
Step by step
- 1Crawlers (bots) follow links to discover and fetch web pages.
- 2The engine indexes each page's content for fast lookup.
- 3When you search, it finds matching pages and ranks them by hundreds of signals.
- 4Relevance, quality, links, and freshness all influence ranking.
Frequently asked questions
- What is crawling and indexing?
- Crawling is discovering pages via links; indexing is storing and organizing their content so it can be searched instantly.
- How do search engines rank pages?
- By many signals — relevance to the query, content quality, links from other sites, freshness, and user experience.
- What is SEO?
- Search Engine Optimization: improving a site so search engines understand it and rank it higher for relevant queries.