indexing

Search engine indexing is the process of a search engine collecting, parses and stores data for use by the search engine. The actual search engine index is the place where all the data the search engine has collected is stored. It is the search engine index that provides the results for search queries, and pages that are stored within the search engine index that appear on the search engine results page. Without a search engine index, the search engine would take considerable amounts of time and effort each time a search query was initiated, as the search engine would have to search not only every web page or piece of data that has to do with the particular keyword used in the search query, but every other piece of information it has access to, to ensure that it is not missing something that has something to do with the particular keyword.

Search engines use crawlers or robots whose main work is to collect information site by site, page by page. How these crawlers do this amazing work? When a search engine crawler visits a web site it reads its content and then follows the hyperlinks from page to page.

The search engine indexing process takes the detailed information collected by the search engine spider (web crawler) and analyses the information.

Each search engine has a different way of analyzing this information, therefore different search engines have different result. A web page may do well in the search engine results on one search engine and poorly on another.

The indexed information is saved in a database, waiting for someone to do a search: