The Google Search: It happens billions of times a day in the blink of an eye and we can have anything before us our minds can think of!
Let’s explore the art and science that makes it possible.
Crawling & Indexing: The journey of a query starts before we ever type a search, with crawling and indexing the web of trillions of documents.
Google uses software known as Web Crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. The most well-known crawler is called Googlebot. Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages and go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers.
The web is like an ever-growing public library with billions of books. Google essentially gathers the pages during the crawl process and then creates an index much like the index in the back of a book. The Google index includes information about words and their locations. When we search, at the most basic level, their algorithms look up our search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.
Algorithms: Algorithms are the computer processes and formulas that take our queries and solve them from thousands of webpages with helpful information. Google uses PageRank Algorithm developed by its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals which include things like the terms on websites, the freshness of content and our region that make it possible to guess what we might really be looking for.
Fighting Spam: Spam sites tries to be on the top of search results through techniques like repeating keywords over and over, buying links that pass PageRank or putting invisible text on the screen. This is bad for search because relevant websites get buried, and it’s bad for legitimate website owners because their sites become harder to find. The good news is that Google’s algorithms can detect the vast majority of spam and demote it automatically.
Here is the glimpse of journey travelled by Google Search
Related Articles:
- How Google Ranking Works?
- How Facebook Display Ads for something you searched
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Basics
- How google updates itself
Important Links :
- https://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/
- http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Pagerank paper by Google founders)
