Google, without doubt one of the giants in the search engine technology has created algorithms to perform the search in web. As we all know web is made up of trillions of sites and it is increasing day by day.
Evolution of Google Search
The Google started developing their first algorithm in 1997 called PageRank algorithm. They have improved so much from the simple text base searching to image (started in 2001) and video based searching. In 2007 Google introduced the universal search – the idea of finding the content no matter what type of content it is (be it images, text or video). Then in 2010 Google came with the notion called Quick answers. This helped the user to get the information they are looking for quickly. For example if you want to get what a word’s definition is you can just start typing the word in the search bar and the Google starts giving the relevant information below the search bar. Quick answers also provide the answers at the top of the page.
How does Google Search engine work?
Crawling and Indexing: Google travels in all websites by crawling. For this they use the indexes from each site. The website owner can decide whether the page should be crawled or not. According to that Google tries to travel links from page to page. Google has an App called Street View which helps Google to list out the physical information about the search results. The Knowledge Graph also helps in sorting the list based on the people, things, places etc. Mainly the sorting is done based on the content. After this process Google makes an index and keeps this stored for future reference.
Image Credit: Shoutmeloud
Algorithms: There are algorithms and programs coded for better search results. The algorithms (computer programs and formulas) look for clues of the content you are looking from the trillion of pages over internet. Google rely on unique signals to understand what you are searching for because your search keyword may come back with millions of pages. This is done by considering region, terms and other small factors.
Google algorithm
There are multiple algorithms for this work and when you hit enter after entering the search keyword the algorithms starts to work. For example there should be different algorithms for different types of search methods. If you are trying to do this by using the voice enabled search option a separate algorithm is used for searching the index. Algorithms give the search engine the clue in what is being searched and how well it can display the search results.
Search projects: There are projects to help the search process and to show the most relevant content. Some of the search projects are autocomplete (guessing what you might be looking for), images (image based results), videos (video based results), synonyms (show the results with words of same meaning), and site and page quality (using algorithm decides which pages contain relevant information). For all the search projects there are different algorithms developed by Google using which the user is provided with the search results.
Removing spams: Like finding the relevant information removing spam content is also important since the spam sites don’t leave any leafs unturned in gaining their place at the top. Google uses its own programs to remove the spam sites and has also employed a team who reviews the sites manually. Google has invested huge in this section and is expanding to other countries fast. Google even notifies the site owner before taking action so that the site owner may bring their site into shape.
Google also has some policies which ensure the safety of the user information and you can check these policies in their website. In summary the process is very simple. The Google crawler indexes the page once it is created and uses the algorithms to give the best results to the users.
