Anatomy and Working of Search Engines
                     ANATOMY AND 
WORKING OF SEARCH 
ENGINES
Introduction
Search engines are in a constant state of 
evolution in order to keep up with the 
SEO’s in much the same way that 
Norton, McAfee, AVG or any of the other 
anti-virus software companies are 
constantly trying to keep up with the 
virus writers.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
ANATOMY OF SEARCH 
ENGINES
 Lungs & Other 
Vital Organs
The lungs of a search engine and indeed the vast 
majority of vital organs are contained within the 
datacenters in which they are housed. Be it in the 
form of power, Internet connectivity, etc. 
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
Arms & Legs 
Think of the links from the engine itself as the 
arms and legs. These are the vehicles by which we 
get where we need to go and retrieve what needs 
to be accessed. 
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
Eyes
The eyes of the search engine are the spiders. 
These are the 1s and 0s that the search engines 
send out over the Internet to retrieve documents. 
In the case of all the major search engines the 
spiders crawl from one page to another following 
the links, as you would look down various paths 
along your way.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
Brain
The brain of a search engine, like the human brain, 
is the most complex of its functions and 
components. The brain must have instinct, must 
know, and must learn in order to function properly.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
WORKING OF SEARCH 
ENGINES
Crawling
This stage involves scanning the sites and obtaining 
information about everything that is contained there: 
page title, keywords, layout, pages that it links to – at 
a bare minimum.
This task is performed by special software robots, 
called “spiders” or “crawlers”.
Source: www.geeksforgeeks.org
Indexing
We can relate in this way: we possess several 
number of books. Going through all of it is the 
crawling, and making a list of them, along with 
their authors and other related information is 
the indexing.
Source: www.geeksforgeeks.org
Ranking and 
Retrieval
Search engines are answer machines. 
Whenever we perform an online search, the 
search engines scour its database for the most 
relevant results. Also, it ranks these results 
based on the popularity of the websites. 
Source: www.geeksforgeeks.org