When you encounter problems, big or small, you always google things without realizing what is going on behind the UI. But, there is a complicated process but it is simple on the surface. So, how does Google Search work?
The Background
Google’s preparation for your query starts long before you submit the request. In fact, Google isn’t searching for the entire web; it’s crawling pages that are in Google’s database. For instance, Google won’t show pages that are disallowed in the robots.txt, or pages that involve login or payment, in the results. Therefore, if you search all content on the Internet in Google, you won’t get a significant part of it.
Even if you’re curious, you probably won’t scroll down to see other pages because the first webpage is all you need, right? However, on one search, Google chooses millions, if not billions of best webpages in less than a second. However, most results are obsolete and are irrelevant to web-surfers. So, how does the astounding search engine look for the most related content according to divergent parameters?
Crawling
So, crawling and indexing is the first steps of initiating a search query. In fact, when you conduct a simple Google Search, the whole globe is serving you! Google’s web crawler, namely Googlebot, does just that. According to Google Search Central, it fetches a few websites at first, and branch the area by following the links on webpages. Then, after lots of operation, the crawler can find a significant bunch of the Internet that may be in the Google Search results.
Indexing
When Google crawled billions of webpages for the search results, it’s time to analyze the relevancy and SEO of each page. It is the SEO index that determines whether the essay is useful or not. Google takes hundreds of factors to compare every page and set its PageRank value.
These questions include, “How many keywords does the article contain, and how frequently it’s used?”, “How many outbound links is in this essay, and where they link to?”, “Is this website a famous one, or is it a not-so-good or even spammy one?”, or “Is this content a breaking news, and is very updated?” But, there’s one that’s more essential, “Does this webpage or website have busy traffic?”. These are all variables that alter your site’s ranking. Nonetheless, holistic SEO is everything necessary for a blogger to raise his/her PageRank value; using unorthodox methods can actually backfire.
Creating Search Results
Finally, we have the ranking prepared, and the only things to add to the Google Search results is your personal information, including your age, gender, search history, and location. For example, if two Google-searchers are in New York and Beijing, respectively, they will obtain different outcomes even with identical queries regarding to different languages. Moreover, if you’re a woman, you aren’t willing to encounter some content explicitly for men, right?
However, ads may take into account, and Google processes them in the search results very seriously. Therefore, Advertisements that aren’t appropriate or relevant aren’t in the search queries.
Oh, one more thing. When Google Search neatly writes its project report into the webpage, it is tidy and neat. That’s because Google wants users to discover as much information as possible while being psychologically soothing.
Conclusion
So, you’ve learned how does Google Search work; the mechanism is complicated and needs high technology to be accomplished. We hope you can learn more in the references below.
References, Credits, and Links
- (n.d.). How Search Works (for beginners) – Google Developers. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/basics/how-search-works
- (n.d.). How Google’s Site Crawlers Index Your Site – Google Search. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/
- Google, (2019, October 24). How Google Search Works (in 5 minutes) – YouTube. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKVizvYSUQ