Introduction
Almost all of us use Google Search engine to look for contents online, you will likely hear people saying “am googling” or “let me google it” or “I have googled it“.
Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their mission is to put the world’s information in one place. Now let’s look at how Google Search works and what happens behind the scenes when you search for something.
How Google Search Works
The web was like an ever-growing public library with billions of books and no central filing system.
Google uses a software known as “Web Crawlers” or “Spiders” to discover publicly available web pages. Crawlers look at web pages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those web pages back to Google servers. Google essentially gathers the pages during the crawl process and then creates an INDEX, they sort the pages by their content and other factors and after they keep track of it all in the INDEX.
When someone types a search query or a keyword, Google’s algorithms get to work by looking for clues to better understand what you mean by trying to autocomplete, check for spelling, synonyms of your search query. Based on these clues, they pull relevant documents from the INDEX. From there they now rank the results using factors.
Results can take a variety of forms, text, images or videos, and all this happens in 1/8th second.
Google fight SPAM 24/7 to keep your results relevant.
Google does not accept payment to rank your page at the top of their search results and you will only see Ads (Advertisements) only when they think it might be relevant for your search.
Ousman Faal [Digital Vigilante] is a Tech Entrepreneur & Digital Skills Trainer who teaches both in the classroom and online. He has experience in various technologies and likes sharing it with others. Ousman has published 149 articles on this blog. He is the CEO of Faalen Technologies and Skills.gm.