miji.beA search engine is a service that helps you find information on the internet by searching through billions of web pages to match your query. Think of it as a librarian for the entire internet - you describe what you are looking for, and the search engine finds the most relevant pages in seconds.
Search engines operate through three main steps. The first step is crawling. Automated programs called crawlers (or spiders) follow links from page to page across the web, discovering and downloading content. The second step is indexing. The search engine analyzes the content of each crawled page and organizes it in a massive database, categorized by keywords and topics. The third step is ranking. When you enter a search query, the engine retrieves matching pages from its index and ranks them by relevance. Google says its ranking systems look at many factors and signals, including the words of the query, the relevance and usability of pages, the expertise of sources, and the user's location and settings.
Google dominates the search market with approximately 90% global share according to StatCounter's 2024 data. In Japan, Yahoo! JAPAN is also popular, but it actually uses Google's search technology under the hood. Microsoft's Bing and others hold much smaller shares.
The relationship between short URLs and search engines matters for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When a search engine crawler encounters a short URL, it follows the redirect to discover the destination page. The type of redirect affects how search engines treat the link. Google explains that it uses permanent redirects such as 301 as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical, and does not use temporary redirects such as 302 as that signal. If search visibility matters, check which type of redirect a URL shortening service uses.
Search engines cannot index everything on the web. Pages with noindex tags stay out of search results, and pages blocked by robots.txt are not crawled, although their URLs can still appear without a description.