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Right from the first alphabet that you put in the search box, Google starts working on your search strings and keeps giving you suggestions and results at the same time, presuming what you might be actually searching. Ever wondered how Google keeps improving with its search results every year? Google gives us a peek in to the inside details of How the Google Search works, all in the simple language that even the non-technical person can understand.
“The perfect search engine would understand what you mean and give you back exactly what you want – Larry Page, Co-founder & CEO”
Google updated this information in its Inside Search page and showed a Live Infographic. Also letting us know a few details which come as a shocker. For instance, Google had reported back in 2008 that they had 1 trillion pages, which has now grown to 30 trillion in just 5 years, which is now stored in 100 million gigabytes! Google says it indexes over 100 billion searches every month. So here’s How the Search works. They explain it in 3 parts.
Part 1 of Google Search: Crawling & Indexing
The web consists of over 30 trillion individual web pages which is constantly growing, exponentially. And to keep track of all of them, Google navigates through all these pages by what it calls Crawling, from one link to another on any given website.
It, however, depends on the website owners whether or not they want Google to crawl on their site. So Google can find a particular site only if its owner allows Google to crawl on his site. Google sorts the pages according to its contents. It keeps track of all of its pages through indexing. The results in Google Search only include sites which have been indexed.
Part 2 of Google Search: Algorithms
What happens when you enter something in your search box? Google tries to understand it and provides you with results. How does it do that? Google has some of their own “Programs & Formulas”. Based on the massive database they have they pull the keywords which you entered, from its indexed pages. And to display the results, they filter the results based on various parameters such as Site & Page quality, its Freshness (How recently was it updated), SafeSearch (Sites containing adult material), User Context (As per geographic location), Universal Search (Images, Videos, Maps, News in a single page), Ranking and over 200 hundred more parameters. Google says their Algorithms constantly keep changing, they keep analyzing, experimenting and tweaking them again and again.
Based on the factors mentioned above, the results appear in different formats depending on your search term, on different devices (Desktop, Tablet, Phone). Sometimes, it may only display web pages in results, sometimes Images or Videos or even both. It will also show ads only if it thinks it is related to your search query.
Part 3 of Google Search: Fighting Spam
Google has its own sets of programs and software’s which keeps fighting spams at any given time to keep our search results safe and relevant. Majority of Spam Removal is automatic and some is done manually. Google says it constantly checks for patterns and deceptive information’s and questionable links found while indexing and accordingly marks them as spam. They notify the website owners in an attempt to take action and allow the owners to fix it and let Google know. Google says it notifies about 40,000-60,000 site owners per month.
There could not have been a better way to understand how the Google search works. And when you see this as a Live Infographic/Slideshow , makes it even more interesting. Or if you feel you are too lazy to see that, you can also watch a video here which explains it all in matter of minutes. Google time and again reminds us why it is the best Search engine out there.
Also Read: Google Glasses: How it Works & Everything you need to know
Feature Photo Credit – Ray Bouknight/Flickr
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