What is a search engine?
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The internet is a vast collection of information that has grown rapidly, reaching 1 billion websites in September 2014, and over 1.5 billion since 2018.
Finding information on the internet would be like looking for a needle in a haystack if not for search engines.
Search engines are software applications that helps you find information on the internet.
On your web browser, when you go to Google, Bing or Yahoo, and type in something that you want information for, the search engine displays results with links to websites that is most relevant to what you are searched for.
The more well known search engines include Google, Bing and Yahoo.
How does the search engine find the information?
Given that the internet has grown so rapidly, how does a search engine find and show you the information you are looking for?
Search engines do this by crawling the internet and indexing any digital content such as websites, web pages, images, videos, etc.
They do this by using web crawlers, often referred to as spiders, which are software programs that crawl or browse the internet and collect information from websites.
These crawlers follow links on web pages to discover new and updated content and index them by using the titles, headings, links, text and other digital content found on the pages.
This information is then saved in their database.
In that process, they also identify keywords in the content of the web page and use this to provide you with results that match your search term.
Keywords are used to help identify main topic of a web page or website.
How do you get your website indexed by search engines?
As mentioned, search engines crawl the internet at regular intervals.
If you have just created a new website, it will be found and indexed by search engines at some point.
However, that is very much dependent on the search engine actually finding your website and this could take some time.
Letting search engines know about your website
A quicker way to let search engines know that you have created a new website is to submit it to them.
Submitting your website will help to speed up the process of the search engine finding and indexing it.
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