I am curious to know about it because we daily use search engines, mostly Google search engine. Yes, there are also others like DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc.
For now, let us see how Google search engine works possibly in short. There are millions of websites on the internet, and most of them update data frequently. For that, it is important to get the best up-to-date relevant information for the user.
It is better to start with how search data is prepared for the search engine to process in a short time to return relevant results to the user. Therefore, as per Google's process, it starts with finding pages on the internet and getting source URLs to process. This process is called crawling.
After this, the crawled sources are processed for indexing. Yes, let us first understand what indexing is here - indexing is the process of storing the main context like title, description, best relevant title, and points from the page content of the website that comes from crawling. Here, that indexing also groups related pages together and clusters them. This indexed data is stored on large databases.
Now, the last result we see when we search on the browser that shows a list of webpages relevant to our query is processed by that indexing data. It also includes around 200 parameters to personalize and make more relevant results to the query, like location, language, search history, etc.
That ranking of pages is based on the most relevant and quality-based results.
Next, I go more deep into that indexing and how that query string is processed and that indexed data is stored.