Crawling and indexing are two distinct steps in a process where search engines locate, file, and rank web content. Crawling is the initial discovery stage, where “spiders” scour the internet looking for new content. Once pages have been crawled, the next phase is indexing. Indexing is the organization and storage of pages that have been crawled. If a page is indexed, it becomes a contender to show as a search result for relevant queries.