Here are the basic steps and components required to build your own search engine from scratch.

1. 5 steps to build a search engine
BY PROMPTCLOUD

2. What are Search Engines?
Simply put, search engines are programs that
search documents for specified keywords and
returns a list of the documents where the
keywords are found.
Essentially a search engine is a general class of
programs, however, the term is often used to
specifically describe the ones that enable users
to search for documents on the World Wide
Web.

3. How Search Engines work

4. Steps to Build a Search Engine
1. Setting up a server
2. Building a web crawler
3. Setting up a database
4. Creating a ranking algorithm
5. Building the search interface

5. Setting up a server
Typically, search engines can be very resource
hungry as they have to crawl, analyse and index
large number of documents, continuously.
Setting up a web server for a search engine can
be a very tricky task due to this resource
intensive nature of the search application. The
web server should have the following qualities:
• Withstand high memory load
• Have high read-write speeds
• Have low network latency

6. Building a web crawler
The web crawler is one of the key components of a
search engine. The function of the crawler is to
traverse through all the pages it can find on the
web in order to index their content. This indexing
is done prior to the event of a user typing in the
search query. This helps the search engine in
providing the relevant results to the user with
minimal time delay. Programming the crawler is a
crucial step and requires highly technical skills.

7. Setting up a database
All the information that the crawler program
fetches from the web gets added to the database.
When the user keys in a query in the search bar,
the application will look for matches in this
database. Since the quantity of data to be stored
would be very high in the case of a search engine,
the database should be on a high capacity storage.
To reduce the latency, search engine databases are
hosted on high performance servers.

8. Creating a ranking algorithm
A search engine algorithm uses keywords as the
input query, and returns relevant search results as
the solution after matching these keywords with
the results stored in its database. These keywords
are determined by search engine spiders that
analyze web page content and keyword relevancy
based on a mathematical formula which will vary
across different search engines. An algorithm that
can ensure relevant search results is a critical
factor for the performance and accuracy of the
search engine.

9. Building the search interface
A search interface hides all the complicated
processes happening inside a search engine and
provides the user with a graphic UI to interact with
the search engine. This helps the user to enter
search terms and get the desired search results in
an easy to consume format. The search interface
can be a simple webpage with a search bar where
users can key in the search phrases.

10. Got questions? Feel free to
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