How do search engines know what websites are out there?
In: 6
Search engines like Google use programs called “web crawlers” or “spiders”. These programs move around the web, starting from a list of known web pages. When they arrive at a page, they do two things:
They scan the page’s content to understand what it’s about. This is how search engines can tell you which websites mention the thing you’re interested in.
They also look for links to other web pages, and add those pages to their list of pages to visit next.
So, web crawlers are constantly hopping from page to page, scanning content and looking for new pages. This process allows the search engine to keep an updated index of what’s on the web. When you search for something, the search engine looks in that index to find relevant pages.
Latest Answers