Most web users wonder how information is input from the website to the search engine’s database. Some people even imagine that people are employed to do this. With millions of websites being displayed every time you search for something, it would require millions of people to do this kind of work, a measure that is undoubtedly not cost effective. This school of thought is thus not feasible as all these employees would not do a thorough job promptly enough. This necessitates the need for a mechanism to carry out this kind of work.

Search engines are powered by robots also called crawlers or spiders. These are automated software that obtains content from the various websites. They do this by visiting websites and gathering the information they need concerning the site. In order to gather consistent and infinite information they use the internal links available on one page to link to other relevant pages. They then add the relevant sites to the index of the search engine. The interlinking assists in gathering information consistently. The sites added to the index create a comprehensive database relevant to the searcher’s query.

Just how do search engines accomplish this complicated process; you may ask. The process is initiated on submission of a website’s URL to the search engine. Once the URL of the webpage is traced by the search engine, it is added to the search engine’s queue of websites that the search engine spider will visit when retrieving information that is relevant to queries. The search engine spider can also locate the address of a website that has not been submitted using interlinks from the already submitted sites. This emphasizes the necessity of building mutual links with other websites that have similar content to your website.

One necessity of a search engine spider robot on a webpage is the existence of a robots.txt file. It is thus necessary to have this file on your website even if it is empty. The file guides the robot on the areas of the webpage that are not important. Once the robot locates this file, it proceeds to list and then save all the links found on the webpage. It will also follow the links to the specific web pages in a bid to get exhaustive information. Once it is through with this, it remits all the information to the search engine.

The search engine assembles all the information submitted by the robots to create a database. The websites are listed in indices by use of algorithms designed by search engine engineers. The algorithms arrange the index list by scanning for the location and frequency of keyword on page. The articles with more keywords are naturally considered more relevant. Advanced search engines can discern keyword stuffing in an article.

After the database has been created, a query can be searched for successfully. When you type a query, the search engine searches through its database to find relevant articles based on the frequency of keywords. This makes the process quicker than searching through websites.