How Google Search Works [Infographic]

Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 4m 953 #google

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

The Way The Internet Works by Google

If you did not already know, I am fascinated with Google. I do not particularly love or hate Google, though if given the chance, I certainly would work for them! But for now, I am interested in how Google works and their influence on the world. No other company in the world has taken over so much of our lives and is a part of it, influences it, and basically controls it to a point, especially our lives on the Internet.

Back in September, when Google turned 16 years old, I wrote a bunch of articles and infographics focused on Google. You can review the Recap Of Google’s Sweet 16th Anniversary if you would like to find out more about how Google affects businesses both negatively and positively. For most web developers and companies who do things legit and create websites and webpages for their visitors, rather than for other reasons, they usually succeed in what they do. Don’t try to trick Google and Google will not trick you out of their search engine.

With the massive empire of Google, when we think about “surfing” or “browsing” the Internet, we do not really go into the unknown anymore, blindly typing in websites, and hoping something comes up. Instead, we turn to Google and other search engines, which have sent out “robots”, “spiders”, or “web crawlers”, or computer software scripts, to search and discover new websites, download their pages, index them to computer databases, and serve them up in search results.

Googlebot is one of those robots, a massive computer database funded by Google, that does this and has been visiting Confessions of the Professions since Day 1 of its creation. It has been to this website every single day without ever missing one day, as this website is updated quite frequently. Googlebot long ago decided this website was updated enough that it needed to come back and visit at least once per day.

You could say that Googlebot is our number one fan. Googlebot most likely found this website when it was submitted through Google’s Add URL and Google Webmaster Tools. Googlebot is very welcome here, as the Google search engine is responsible for a great majority of traffic to this website. Additional webpages on this website are found through other websites linking to it.

While some of the methods, standards, and rules Google uses can be controversial, the importance of understanding how Google search works is: While they cannot create a replica of the human brain, they want the Internet to be filled with websites that are interesting to the human brain, and organized in such a way that the human brain understands. If you build your website for humans, Google will continue to be interested in your website. Google continually indexes, categorizes, and indexes the Internet for the human brain.

This video of Matt Cutts further explains the Googlebot method of crawling and indexing websites on the Internet.

In addition to this video, this infographic explains how Google Search works in 4 steps.

1. BEFORE YOU SEARCH
2. AS YOU SEARCH
3. RANKING
4. RESULT

Click to open / Right-click for save options

Text-Friendly Version

SPLIT SECOND SEARCH

1. BEFORE YOU SEARCH

The journey of a search query begins long before you type your search into Google. We use software robots, known as web crawlers or spiders, that find webpages to include later in Google search results. Google’s software stores data about these pages in data centers. The web is like a book with trillions of pages, and our job is to index that book.

Our index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes

We’ve spent over 1 million computing hours building the index so far

2. AS YOU SEARCH

When you start your search, that’s when Google’s algorithm begins to find the information you’re looking for.

The search query travels on average 1,500 miles to get the answer back to you (and may hit different data centers around the world along the way), at a speed that’s close to the speed of light, hundreds of millions of miles per hour.

As you type your query, you’ll start seeing predictions of searches you might be looking for and results showing up, without you having to hit enter. It saves you time and gets you to your answer as quickly as possible. This is what we call Google Instant.

3. RANKING

The algorithm looks at your query and uses over 200 signals to decide which of the millions of pages and content are the most relevant answers for that query. Google finesses its ranking algorithms with over 500 improvements per year.

Examples of these signals include:

• The freshness of content on a website
• The number of other websites linking to a particular site & the authority of those links
• Words on the webpage
• Spell check
• Synonyms of your search keywords
• Quality of the content on the site
• URL & title of webpage
• Whether the best result is a webpage, image, video, news articles, personal result, etc.
• Personalization
• Results recommended by people you’re connected to

4. RESULTS

Results are ranked in order by relevance and displayed on the page. In addition to showing you results, we also render a preview of those webpages which you can see by hovering on the arrows to the right of the result, so you can quickly decide if it’s a site you want to visit.

There are billions of searches each day on Google.

The Instant Previews load in 1/10^th of a second on average

Since 2003 Google has answered 450 billion new unique queries searches we have never seen before.

16% of searches we see every day are new.

Source: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html

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