How Google’s Search Engine Really Works

Google’s search engine is technically complex. There are hundreds (some say thousands) of different factors taken into account so that the search engine can figure out what should go where. It’s like a mysterious black box, and very few people know exactly what’s inside. However, the good news is that search engines are actually pretty easy to understand. We may not know every single factor (out of a hundred or thousand), but we also don’t need to. I’ll bring it down to the basics with a simple method to please Google rank higher and bring in more website traffic.

     How do search engines crawl the web? Google’s first job is to ‘crawl’ the web with ‘spiders.’ These are little-automated programs or bots that scour the ‘net for any and all new information. The spiders will take notes on your website, from the titles you use to the text on each page to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who might be interested in finding you.

How Google’s Search Engine Really Works (A Peek Under The Hood)
Home » Blog » SEO » How Google’s Search Engine Really Works (A Peek Under The Hood) google.
Google’s search engine is technically complex.

There are hundreds (some say thousands) of different factors taken into account so that the search engine can figure out what should go where. It’s like a mysterious black box, and very few people know exactly what’s inside. However, the good news is that search engines are actually pretty easy to understand. We may not know every single factor (out of a hundred or thousand), but we also don’t need to. I’ll bring it down to the basics with a simple method to please Google, rank higher, and bring in more website traffic. I’m also going to introduce you to some of the latest developments, like RankBrain, that help Google guesses what you’re actually looking for (even if you don’t type it in). But first, I’m going to walk you through exactly how Google’s search engine really works so that you can see that it’s not as difficult to understand as you might think.
How do search engines crawl the web?

Google’s first job is to ‘crawl’ the web with ‘spiders.’ These are little-automated programs or bots that scour the ‘net for any and all new information. The spiders will take notes on your website, from the titles you use to the text on each page to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who might be interested in finding you.

That may sound simplistic on the face of it. But that’s no small feat considering that there are anywhere from 300-500 new web pages created every single minute of the day. So the first massive challenge is to locate new data, record what it’s about, and then store that information (with some accuracy) in a database. Google’s next job is to figure out how to best match and display the information in its database when someone types in a search query. Scaling becomes a problem again, though. Google now processes over two trillion searches in a single year. That’s up from only one billion a year in 1999. That’s roughly a 199,900% volume increase in the last seventeen years!
So the information in its database needs to be categorized correctly, rearranged, and displayed in less than a second after someone expects it. And time is of the essence here. Speed wins, according to Marissa Mayer back when she worked for Google over a decade ago. She reported that when they were able to speed up the time it took the Google Maps home page to load (by cutting down on its size), traffic leaped 10% within seven days and 25% just a few weeks later. Google won the search engine race, then, because it’s able to:

• Find and record more information
• Deliver more accurate results
•  And do both of those two tasks faster than any other engine
•  It’s gotten incredibly good at shuttling information back-and-forth across its “pipeline,” which connects users to its database of information.

One of the reasons Google jumped out to an early head start on all of this stuff came down to the accuracy of its results. The information it displayed was simply a lot better. Think about it this way.

When you type something into Google, you’re expecting something. It might be a simple answer, as the weather in your city, or maybe a little more complex, like “how does Google’s search engine really work?” Google’s results, compared to other alternatives at the time, answered those queries better. The information was the best of the best. And this breakthrough came from an initial theory Google’s co-founders actually worked on in college.