Indexing

Search engine indexing involves the collection, organization, and storage of online data for the purpose of speeding up and pinpointing information retrieval. As opposed to the type of index that one would find in the back of a book, the index of a search engine relies largely upon keywords and metadata to organize results.

Together with crawling and ranking, indexing makes up one of the three main components that create search engine results.

After a search engine's crawler returns with data from webpages, it generates an enormous index of all the words it has scanned together with their location on each page forming what becomes a database with billions of webpages.

Search engines use an algorithm to analyze the collected data and measure its relevance compared to other similar pages.

Severs around the globe give users near instant access to these indexed pages allowing for the fast and easy access to information that internets users have grown accustom to.