Imagine the internet as a gigantic library with billions of books. Each web page is like a book, and indexing is the process of organizing and cataloging these pages so that they can be easily found by search engines.

When you perform a search on Google or any other search engine, you’re essentially asking it to fetch information from its index, which is a massive database containing records of all the web pages it has crawled and deemed worthy of inclusion.

Crawling: Search engines deploy bots, often referred to as spiders or crawlers, to roam the internet and discover new and updated content. These bots follow links from one page to another, collecting information along the way.
Indexing: Once the bots gather information, search engines organize and store it in their index. This index is like the master catalog that allows the search engine to quickly retrieve relevant information when a user enters a search query.
Ranking: After indexing, search engines use complex algorithms to determine the ranking of web pages. The goal is to provide users with the most relevant and high-quality content based on their search queries. Pages that are well-optimized and deemed authoritative are likely to rank higher.