How Google Search Works?
How does Google work? If you’re like most people, your answer is probably “I don’t really know how it works.” This blog post will give you some insight into the inner workings of one of the most popular websites on the internet.
It is worth noting that Google is one of the world’s most popular search engines. People worldwide turn to Search to find information, learn about topics of interest, and make crucial decisions.
Google has its own mechanism for understanding an inquiry. It searches billions of queries every day using its algorithm to produce the best possible results. So when someone searches for something on Google, they are actually searching through billions upon billions of web pages – trillions if we include links within those web pages.
Google gets its information from a variety of sources, including:
- Web pages
- Book scanning
- User-submitted content such as Google My Business and Maps user
- Public database on the internet
- Videos, images, and many other sources
This page, however, focuses on web pages. Google generates web page results in three different ways:
- Crawling: When you type something on the Google Search bar, you aren’t exactly searching the web, but you’re searching Google’s web index using web crawlers. Search engines crawl hundreds of billions of pages using their web crawlers. Web crawlers are often referred to as search engine spiders or bots.
Spiders start by fetching a few web pages, then they follow the link on those pages and fetch the pages they point to. They then follow all the links on all those pages and fetch the pages they link to. This process goes on until a page is discovered and indexed. Then, the spider analyzes all the keywords, web pages, descriptions, etc., to learn the data search.
- Indexing: Whenever a search engine finds a webpage, it adds it to an index, the data structure that contains the web page. An index contains all the URLs discovered along with several key indicators about the contents of each URL, such as:
- The keywords discovered within the content of the page – which topics does it cover?
- What type of content is crawled, and what is included on the page?
- The freshness of the page-when was it last updated?
- The previous engagement of users with the page and domain-how do they interact with the page?
When Google discovers a new page, it tries to understand what the page is about. This is known as indexing. Google analyzes the content of a website, catalogs images, and video files, and attempts to understand the page as a whole.
- Serving: Google tries to provide the best results when a user searches on Google. When a user enters a query, the spider searches the index for matching pages and returns the results Google believes to be the most relevant. Relevance depends on hundreds of factors, which includes:
- User’s location
- Language detected
- The device used (desktop or mobile)
- Previous queries or search history
When selecting and ranking websites, Google considers the user experience, so make sure that your page loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.