Search engines are designed to help you find information on the internet. They use two main components:

• Search index. A digital library of information about web pages.
• Search algorithms. Programs that match and rank results from the index based on your search query.

Search engines work in three phases:

• Crawling: Web crawlers (or spiders) visit and download webpages by following links from known pages.
• Indexing: The information from crawled pages is processed and added to the search index.
• Ranking: When you perform a search, the algorithm ranks relevant results based on various factors to provide the best answers.

So, in a nutshell, when you search, search engines look through all the pages in the index for relevant results. They then rank them using a computer program called an algorithm to put the best results at the top and display a search engine result page (SERP) to the user.