How long will it take for my website to get indexed in the search engines?

Before a search engine displays the result of a search to the user, it must collect and store a huge amount of data to create an effective output. Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet the web pages keep on changing. This means that the process of collecting information by the search engine on the Internet or spidering never stops. For a search engine to be effective it must cover two main areas of information handling.

1. What information stored with the data.
2. The method by which the information is indexed.

Consequently, the search engine could just store the URL and relevant keywords. But this would limit the usability of a search engine. Because it would not know how those keywords are being used on the web site. Are they being used in a relevant manner or are they being used in a trivial way. How many times did the keywords appear on the web page? Are those words being used in headings and titles or are they being used in links to other pages. There would be no way to rank the web page in the searched result.

To make the results more useful the search engines assign weights to keywords as they appear on a web page. It assigns increasing weights to words that appear near the start of page or for words that appear in headings or titles on a page. Or it may assign weights based on the number of times a word appears on a page. There is no fixed formula as to how a search engine assigns these weights. That is the reason that search results on different search engines produce different results with web sites appearing in different order on different search engine.

Index has only one purpose that is to produce the search result as quickly as possible. The simplest way for a search engine to assign weights to create a normal search is to use hashing. Some letters in English begin more words than others. For instance, in a dictionary the words starting with letter M cover more pages than letter X. This means that finding a word with a popular letter could take much longer than finding a word with an unpopular one. Hashing evens out this difference in a search so that it reduces the average time to find a word.

How long would it take for a search engine to index a page would depend on the complexity of the page. Usually it takes between 48 hours for a small search engine to index a page. But larger search engine could take up to several weeks to index a web site.