The document provides an overview of how search engines work by covering crawling, indexing, and ranking. It explains that search engines use crawler programs to scan websites and understand the structure, content, and updates of pages. During indexing, the content is analyzed, keywords are identified, and pages are sorted and stored. For ranking, algorithms analyze user queries and match pages based on relevancy of content and keywords to the query, webpage quality signals, and popularity. The ranked pages are then presented to users as search results.