Google Search: How does it Work?

Every time you search for something, it starts off on the web. This vast web is consisted of over 60 trillion individual pages, and constantly growing each day. When you perform a Google Search, Google starts off by navigating the web using a technique known as “Crawling.” The way Google performs this task is by building a specific tool used to go from page to page.

When crawling the web, the program will start on Company A’s main page, and then it will follow every link on that main page to other pages within the same website, as well as external links. So if Company A has 5 pages on their website, the program covers each of those 5 pages and will still continue to look for other links on each of the 5 pages. If Company A also has a link to other online services from Company B, and Company B has 17 pages on their website, then the program will go onto Company B and “Crawl” around that website.

This process is a never ending repeating cycle for the program; and there are several hundreds of thousands of the little web crawling robots on the web, assisting Google’s search engine.

Then, Google sorts the pages in accordance to their content, as well as other factors. The content gathered from the web crawlers contains over 100 million gigabytes of data. And then Google corporation keeps track of everything, known as “The Index.”

Once the web crawling and indexing is performed, the company then proceeds onto programming the programs & formulas. The programs & formulas that are designed and developed by Google, aim to provide only the best results possible for your searches.

They start off with the algorithms. The algorithm of each search is unique as the search engine itself. The algorithm often looking for specific clues within the compounds of your search text in order to better understand your needs, when performing searches. Then the “site ranking” takes place. The site ranking is held based upon the website(s) site & page quality, freshness of the content, safe searching, as well as user context. Google utilizes over 200 factors when they perform the site ranking aspect of each website.

This is done within the compounds of Google’s search lab department. The algorithms that are developed at the Google Search Lab is constantly undergoing new changes. Such changes are brought forth from the ideas by the engineers. Once a new idea has been released, the development process commences;  tweaking, experimenting, analyzing results, and then the running of the new concept over and over again occurs, until the idea is either perfect, or just won’t work at all.

And guess what? All of this is performed within just 1/8 of a second from the time you hit enter; and then you can see the results of your new search.

If this has not surprised you so far, wait until you hear about the spam fighting department.

Google is constantly on the never ending battlefield of fighting spam. They fight against spam by providing a spam removal system. This automatic spam remover is examined by the company’s questionable documentations by hand. If any of the people working on the spam fighting team sees it, they will take it out manually. Once the company has fished out the spam, you are presented with a front page that is easy to use, with less spam to deal with. When Google detects an issue with a site, they notify the webmaster. Once the webmaster has fixed the issues on their site, they can then report back to Google and get it back up right away, or wait until the next cycle.

Google does all of the hard work, while you can get onto your life, not having to worry about all of the nonsense just to find what you are looking for.

Sources: Google.Com, Arstechnica.Com, FastWeb.It

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