Before answering that question, what is a Search Engine? So based in Wikipedia, search engine “is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.” Example: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. And to find that answer, I used a search engine, particularly, Google.

Have you ever wonder how frequent you use Google or other search engines per day? World Wide Web is a huge place. If you know a website, you can find it by just type in the web address in the address bar of browser. What if you don’t know the URL?

For many, Search engine is an internet. When you want to find the “Asus Zenfone Laser 2 specs”, search engine will display the list of web pages that containing information about Asus Zenfone Laser 2. Search Engine have become part of our lives. We use them to find things online, learning tools, directions or map and also for business.

Search engine has 3 functions: Crawling, Indexing and Retrieval & Ranking.

CRAWLING – it all begins here. An automated bot / spider / crawler / web crawler collects all the data in a website. For Google it is “Googlebot”. It will scan the website and collect all details in the website such as page title, images, and linked pages.

INDEXING – every time a bot / crawler visits a web page, it stores the information collected from a web page to search engine’s massive databases. It makes a copy of it and add the URL to an index and repeats the process, until it builds a huge index of many web pages.

RETRIEVAL & RANKING – When someone perform online searching, search engine goes down to its billions of documents. It returns a result that Relevant or useful to searcher’s query and RANK those results according to the Popularity of the website serving the information.

Search Engine Algorithms

To determine the relevance and popularity, search engines employs mathematical equations or Algorithms. Search engine algorithms has a hundreds of variables, or what we called “Ranking Factors”.

Google core algorithms:

Google Panda – it takes the quality of the website’s content when ranking sites in search results. It ranks a website with high quality content that answer the searcher’s query.

Google Penguin – This is the second core algorithm of Google. It deals with the link quality. Most of the affected of this algorithm is the sites with poor link building.

Google Hummingbird – This is part of the Google main search algorithm, it ensure that it serves the best results for specific queries. Hummingbird is more about able to understand search queries better, particularly with conversational search.