Diagram on How Google Search Works

I was reading the local newspapers today and there was an article explaining how Google works… Thought I’ll share….

Since my scanner isn’t working, I took a picture of the page, so pardon me for the fuzziness on some parts of the page..

Taken from: Digital Life, (The Straits Times), Singapore.

For those who find the words in the picture fuzzy, here is a transcript of it:

1. Google sends out Web crawlers known as Googlebots, that go through all the Web pages on the World Wide Web.
2. These bots are made up of millions of computers that surf the Web much like how people do it, except they do it much more quickly. To make sure that they have the most current sites, these Googlebots are working all the time, crawling and re-crawling websites.
3. How often a site is crawled depends on how quickly its content changes. For example, a newspaper site that has frequent updates will get crawled more often than a static company site. Webmasters can also indicate how often they want their sites to be crawled.
4. The bots also detect all links on the site which are then put into a queue system for crawling later on. These links are also important in deciding the search ranking of a site
5. Copies of all these pages are stored in Google’s index database. The index works like the contents page of a book and contains all the possible search terms.
6. When a user types in a query in the search engine, the index will match the query with all the webpages in which the query terms appear and then grab the pages for the search results.
7. At the same time, a short description of the pages is generated for the search results page.
8. Web pages are ranked in terms of relevance before they are displayed on the results page. Google considers some 200 factors when ranking sites. One of them is PageRank, which takes into consideration how many sites are linked to a webpage and the quality of the linking sites.

The diagram shown is simplified but it does sufficiently show how Google Search works in all brevity.. Google’s algorithms are definitely much more complex.Drawing some inference, point 8 also shows why there is a presence of “Search Engine Opimization (SEO)” firms and other similar services.

How Google Search actually works is  a closely guarded trade secret and only Google’s founders, or at most, their engineers know about its true workings..