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 when almost all that was needed were keywords and backlinks.
If you were to ask how many ranking factors Google has these days, the honest answer is that no one knows exactly. But most SEO professionals will tell you there are well over 200 of them.
It is clear that search engines have become significantly more complex. Part of the reason is that the web has become more complicated and much more extensive. Search engines are also more complex these days because people are always trying to reverse engineer the hidden ranking factors for their own benefit.
Head of Product, IPRoyal.
Do search engines themselves need proxies?
Today, if you were to build a search engine from scratch, 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 will be added to an index. Users can then use the search bar to browse 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 has to send thousands or even millions of requests to a website to index every piece of content, chances are your regular IP address will be banned. Additionally, some content may only be accessible if you are from a certain country or region, making proxies a necessity.
Established search engines like Google are not banned by websites because almost everyone wants their content indexed. They still need to purchase location-based content, but they probably use their own servers instead of third-party proxy providers – although we can’t be sure.
How Proxies Affected Search Engines
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. SEO professionals and enthusiasts have always wanted to know how search engines rank websites and what influences the top positions.
If you were a regular user, that would be impossible to figure out. Although Google provides guidelines, most of them are vague (such as “produce good content”). However, SEO professionals have figured out that they can scrape search engines extensively and add internal data from websites to gain insight into ranking factors.
However, proxies should be used as most search engines are quick to ban users who send too many requests. Furthermore, localized content is not served effectively without hundreds of IP addresses.
As a result, SEO professionals created special tools (also sold to other professionals) to understand how and why search engines rank certain content over others. Some of these insights can be very striking and direct.
A good example of understanding and abusing ranking systems was the SEO competition held way back in 2018. Someone managed to rank a rhinoplasty website for English search results, but the entire website was written in Latin.
Search engines of course know that there are tools that supposedly display ranking factors. So if the content is too accurate, search engines have to adjust their algorithms to prevent people from abusing the rankings.
Even when used by legitimate SEO use cases, people knowing too much about how search engines rank content can cause problems. The result is that search engines have to play a constant game of cat and mouse.
And that cat-and-mouse game is only really possible through large-scale data collection via search engines, only made possible by proxies. So ultimately, proxies have a lot of influence on the way search engines function.
It’s all too easy to think that proxies are negative – in that they reveal some kind of secret classification system and allow people to abuse it. But many of the changes and tweaks made to the algorithms over the years were intended to improve search results.
In a sense, SEO tools and web data collection with proxies create indirect competition for search engines. They don’t take away the revenue from these companies. But they do encourage them to continually improve and adapt the ranking algorithms – which will benefit everyone in the long run.
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