To develop a simple web-based search engine focusing on web crawling, indexing, and ranking using Java, it's recommended to take the CS101 course on Udacity. This course covers the essential components needed to build a search engine, although it uses Python, the concepts can be easily adapted to Java. It's important to note that the course does not provide a complete working search engine due to the ethical considerations of web crawling, which requires careful handling of server requests to avoid overwhelming them. The process of web crawling involves making requests to seed pages, parsing HTML for links, and recursively following those links. For indexing and ranking, understanding Google's algorithm is beneficial, as it emphasizes the importance of backlinks and the quality of those links in determining page rank.