How search engines work?

Search engines are special websites that have indexed billions of pages and make it easy for you to find a website or a page in an instant like Google, bing or ask.

So how do search engines get results?

A search engine looks around the web using automated programs called web crawlers. The crawlers follow links from page to page. The crawlers send a copy of each page back to the search engine, which then builds an index of the words on each page.

Imagine it like searching trees in a forest for honey, the trees are webpages, the branches links to other pages , the honey - is what are you looking for.

Just searching the index for 'honey' would bring back too many results though, and it would be hard to find the best results.

This could include alternative spellings or how you searched and then the relevant items are pulled out of the index. That's still a whole lot of honey though! To find the very best honey , the results are ranked.Over 200 different factors can effect the rank of the results , such as how frequent the page is updated , how well it is written, or whether lot of other webpages link to it.

The result which fit most of the algorithms requirements so it will come up first in your result page.