There’s A LOT of information on the internet. Currently, there are around 1.18 billion websites in the World (01 Jan 2022). Search Engines make this info easier to find and are essential ‘answer machines’. Google isn’t the only search engine — there’s Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and more so why the focus on Google? Simply put – no one does search better. In fact, Google is so iconic that it is often used in place of the word ‘search’, think of the phrases, “just google it” or “let me google it”. With a 92.47% market share as of 01 March 2022, Google dominates the search engine industry and with it’s bold mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
So how does Google Search work? Is it magic? Rocket science?
Google Search works in (basically) three stages:
Crawling: automated programs called crawlers search the web regularly looking for pages that are new or updated. The page addresses (or page URLs) are stored on a database for later.
Indexing: pages previously learned about during crawling are analysed to determine what the page is about this includes the content, images, and video files in/on the page. This info is stored in the index. Google’s Index contains over 130 trillion web pages.
After a page has been indexed and crawled, it is ready to appear on a search engine results page (SERP).
Results/Ranking: When a user performs a Google Search, Google tries to determine the highest quality results to display on the SERP. The “best” results have many factors, including things such as location, language, device, previous search history page quality and relevance and is done algorithmically.
Google uses an algorithm for determining results, like all other search engines, and shares some information about the algorithm, but the specifics are a company secret to reduce abuse of the system and stay competitive.
Search engines and all their beautiful complexity have completely changed how we access information – you can even list Googling as a skill on your CV. Don’t believe me? Google it.
Ps. Did you know “L2B’s search is a distributed, full-text search engine, or search and analytics database. Unlike traditional relational databases that store data in tables, Our search uses a key-value store for objects and is a lot more versatile. It can run queries much more complicated than traditional databases and do this at a petabyte-scale.” L2B’s Search was developed by our senior IT Dev Barry West.
For more on How Google Search works watch the below video.
Sources: Google
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About Sasha Anderson
Millennial Mom + wife living the hash-tag life. Reach out if you want to talk: L2B, social media, construction, technology, marriage, parenting, popular culture and travel. Remember: If You Fail - Fail Forward
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