What occurs first when a search engine operates?

• A. Websites are searched, and keywords are compiled
• B. Information on websites is organized in databases
• C. Pages are sorted, ranked, and displayed to the user by relevance
• D. Information in databases is matched against searches

Answer: (A)

The first thing a search engine does is discover content on the web and pull it into its system. Crawlers visit websites, fetch their pages, and extract the words and metadata that appear on them, turning those pages into a set of searchable keywords. This initial gathering creates the material the engine will search against, so it’s the foundational step that makes everything else possible.

Only after this gathering is there a need to organize the collected information into a database or index, which is what makes searching efficient. Then, when a user enters a query, the engine matches the query against that index, ranks the results by relevance, and displays them to the user. In short, crawling and keyword extraction come first, followed by indexing, then retrieval and ranking.