We use it almost every day but how does the Google search engine works ?

First of all, you should know what a search engine is: in English “Search Engine”, a search engine is an online service allowing you to find pages using keywords via a set of software that Constantly “crawl” the web in order to index these pages and update the index with the latest version of them.

Collect data

At any time, the Google robot (originally called GoogleBot) “crawls” the web in search of pages. That is to say, it visits the pages of the web and will follow all the links it finds in order to discover new pages (whether within the same site or if the links refer to other domains, new sites).

Robots, in general, are very fond of fresh and new content, the more you create, the more robots and therefore Google will come to “crawl” your site regularly.

Indexing

Once the data has been collected, Google will work on storing it in its data centers, but above all on organizing it. This is the indexing work that begins, the engine will then study in detail all the pages that it may have received (the code, images, links, keywords, etc.).

Google will then classify all this information into two different indexes:

• main index: index in which Google will put all the data collected during the crawl.

• inverted index: will contain all the potential keywords that can be associated with web URLs.

This index will allow Google to know the number of times a keyword appears on a page, compared to other pages and of course, this will have an influence on the ranking of the page when a user types this word. key. But be careful, it would be too easy to include a keyword in a page to position it, hundreds of other criteria are taken into account by Google and you should know that “keyword stuffing (“KeyWord Stuffing") is now penalized by the American giant.

Query processing and ranking

After collecting and indexing the data from the sites, Google will seek to offer Internet users the pages that seem most relevant to their queries. To do this, Google will classify the data (and therefore the pages) according to dozens and dozens of criteria that can be grouped as follows:

Relevance: this will concern the keywords present on the page, their density, their positioning, the weight of these keywords in the database, the proximity between the Internet users' query and the keywords present on the page, etc.

Popularity: corresponds to Netlinking, that is to say the number of backlinks as well as the quality of the backlinks which point to your site. As a reminder, a backlink is a link on a site that points to your site. In short, your popularity will be defined by how many people talk about your site and how they talk about it.

Audience: this corresponds to the quality of the traffic that comes to your page, therefore the behavior of Internet users on your site. The more they stay on your site, click on pages, come back to them, the more Google will consider your site as relevant and promote its SEO.