There are various names for Google’s spiders. The commonly used name is crawler, and another name is search engine bot. 🕷️ A crawler, spider, or search engine bot primarily collects information from internet websites. This process marks the beginning of Google’s work.
Mainly, Google Search works in three stages:
- Crawling 🕵️: It collects information (text, images, and videos) from pages of websites that are available on the internet.
- Indexing 📚: It analyzes and stores the data in its giant database.
- Ranking 📊: When a user searches on Google, Google returns its database and comes up with the most relevant results to the user’s query.
To understand this process better, let’s imagine a modern library 📖:
You own a library filled with thousands of books, magazines, and digital archives. To keep things running smoothly, you and your two friends manage the operations. A massive delivery of books arrives one day, awaiting sorting.
You instruct your first friend to quickly grab all the boxes and bring them into the library. He scans each book’s barcode, collecting all information about each title—just like a 🕷️crawler collects data from websites for Google.
Next, your second friend arranges the books on shelves according to genres—history, science, fiction, politics, and more. This friend is your 📚 indexer, making sure every book is properly stored and ready to be found when needed, just like Google stores website data in its vast databases.
Finally, a customer walks in, looking for a book on ancient civilizations. It’s now your turn. You recall exactly where the book is and present it to the customer with a smile 😊, fulfilling their request. In this role, you act as Google’s 📊 ranking algorithm, quickly matching the user’s request with the most relevant content available.
Google’s goal is to prioritize user satisfaction, delivering the most relevant results to each search query. Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl sites more often or rank them higher; it all comes down to relevance and quality.
✨This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play, helping websites optimize their content to appear more prominently in search results. ✨