What is search indexing?
Search indexing is like creating a library card catalog for the Internet so that a search engine knows where on the Internet to retrieve information when a person searches for it. It can also be compared to the index in the back of a book, which lists all the places in the book where a certain topic or phrase is mentioned.
Indexing focuses mostly on the text that appears on the page, and on the metadata* about the page that users don't see. When most search engines index a page, they add all the words on the page to the index – except for words like "a," "an," and "the" in Google's case. When users search for those words, the search engine goes through its index of all the pages where those words appear and selects the most relevant ones.
*In the context of search indexing, metadata is data that tells search engines what a webpage is about. Often the meta title and meta description are what will appear on search engine results pages, as opposed to content from the webpage that's visible to users.
How do web crawlers work?
The Internet is constantly changing and expanding. Because it is not possible to know how many total webpages there are on the Internet, web crawler bots start from a seed, or a list of known URLs. They crawl the webpages at those URLs first. As they crawl those webpages, they will find hyperlinks to other URLs, and they add those to the list of pages to crawl next.
Given the vast number of webpages on the Internet that could be indexed for search, this process could go on almost indefinitely. However, a web crawler will follow certain policies that make it more selective about which pages to crawl, in what order to crawl them, and how often they should crawl them again to check for content updates.
The relative importance of each webpage: Most web crawlers don't crawl the entire publicly available Internet and aren't intended to; instead they decide which pages to crawl first based on the number of other pages that link to that page, the amount of visitors that page gets, and other factors that signify the page's likelihood of containing important information.
The idea is that a webpage that is cited by a lot of other webpages and gets a lot of visitors is likely to contain high-quality, authoritative information, so it's especially important that a search engine has it indexed – just as a library might make sure to keep plenty of copies of a book that gets checked out by lots of people.
Revisiting webpages: Content on the Web is continually being updated, removed, or moved to new locations. Web crawlers will periodically need to revisit pages to make sure the latest version of the content is indexed.
Robots.txt requirements: Web crawlers also decide which pages to crawl based on the robots.txt protocol (also known as the robots exclusion protocol). Before crawling a webpage, they will check the robots.txt file hosted by that page's web server.
A robots.txt file is a text file that specifies the rules for any bots accessing the hosted website or application. These rules define which pages the bots can crawl, and which links they can follow.
Search indexing is like creating a library card catalog for the Internet so that a search engine knows where on the Internet to retrieve information when a person searches for it. It can also be compared to the index in the back of a book, which lists all the places in the book where a certain topic or phrase is mentioned.
Indexing focuses mostly on the text that appears on the page, and on the metadata* about the page that users don't see. When most search engines index a page, they add all the words on the page to the index – except for words like "a," "an," and "the" in Google's case. When users search for those words, the search engine goes through its index of all the pages where those words appear and selects the most relevant ones.
*In the context of search indexing, metadata is data that tells search engines what a webpage is about. Often the meta title and meta description are what will appear on search engine results pages, as opposed to content from the webpage that's visible to users.
How do web crawlers work?
The Internet is constantly changing and expanding. Because it is not possible to know how many total webpages there are on the Internet, web crawler bots start from a seed, or a list of known URLs. They crawl the webpages at those URLs first. As they crawl those webpages, they will find hyperlinks to other URLs, and they add those to the list of pages to crawl next.
Given the vast number of webpages on the Internet that could be indexed for search, this process could go on almost indefinitely. However, a web crawler will follow certain policies that make it more selective about which pages to crawl, in what order to crawl them, and how often they should crawl them again to check for content updates.
The relative importance of each webpage: Most web crawlers don't crawl the entire publicly available Internet and aren't intended to; instead they decide which pages to crawl first based on the number of other pages that link to that page, the amount of visitors that page gets, and other factors that signify the page's likelihood of containing important information.
The idea is that a webpage that is cited by a lot of other webpages and gets a lot of visitors is likely to contain high-quality, authoritative information, so it's especially important that a search engine has it indexed – just as a library might make sure to keep plenty of copies of a book that gets checked out by lots of people.
Revisiting webpages: Content on the Web is continually being updated, removed, or moved to new locations. Web crawlers will periodically need to revisit pages to make sure the latest version of the content is indexed.
Robots.txt requirements: Web crawlers also decide which pages to crawl based on the robots.txt protocol (also known as the robots exclusion protocol). Before crawling a webpage, they will check the robots.txt file hosted by that page's web server.
A robots.txt file is a text file that specifies the rules for any bots accessing the hosted website or application. These rules define which pages the bots can crawl, and which links they can follow.
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