How search engines changed with proxies

Search engines all hide their indexing, ranking, and sorting algorithms under lock and key. During the early stages of the most popular search engine – Google – ranking signals were relatively simple. These were the days where almost all that was needed were keywords and backlinks.

If you were to ask how many ranking factors Google today has, the honest answer is that no one knows exactly. But most SEO professionals will tell you there’s well over 200 of them.

Clearly, search engines have become significantly more complex. Part of the reason is that the web has become more complicated and much more vast. Search engines are also more complex today because people are always trying to reverse engineer the hidden ranking factors for their own benefit.

Do search engines themselves need proxies?

If you were to build a search engine from scratch today, you would need proxy servers to make it function properly. The underlying technology of a search engine is relatively simple. It runs an automated script that crawls through a website, downloads the HTML, and analyzes the content.

Assuming the content is deemed relevant, it’s added to an index. Users can then use the search bar to run through the index to find the content they need. Of course, the internet is now so vast and advanced that such a simplistic search engine would be considered a failure.

Since a crawler needs to send thousands or even millions of requests to a website to index every piece of content, it’s likely your regular IP address would get banned. Additionally, some content may only be accessible if you’re from a particular country or…