How Does the Google Search Engine Work?

Hi,
The aim of Sergey Brin and Larry Page in designing the algorithm was to build the perfect search engine that could fetch the most relevant information to any query. Let us see how Google search engine works. The secret behind Google's working is its web crawler bot which travels through the length of breadth of the Internet, indexing every new page that gets published.

How does the crawler discover new pages? The crawler looks for new links on pre-indexed pages and crawls them as soon as they become live. Every page that is indexed, goes through a range of 'checks'. The number and content of web pages linking to that page is checked (which decides its importance) and it goes through a rigorous quality check in terms of content, code and other features.

A snapshot of the page gets saved in the Google cache, which is located on one of the Google servers, in the many data centers it has around the world. When you search for anything, Google searches its vast cached database of pages on its local server, applying various filters of relevance, to provide the most accurate of search results! Now Google even provides a personalized search, whereby your results are customized according to usage history. Google handles more than a billion queries daily in this manner! There are more than 100 parameters including incoming links, content and page history that are given importance when displaying a page in a search query. All this happens within fractions of seconds. This was a very short summary of how Google works.

Hope this article has somewhat lifted the veil from the inner workings of the Google search engine for you. Google will of course never reveal the algorithm that makes it possible for it to deliver accurate results and the technology that makes the delivery of billions of search queries possible, as it is it's trade secret. It is constantly evolving as a search engine, while making new changes in strategy like the introduction of the 'Google Instant' feature recently, which delivers results as you type! It is also a demonstration of the brute strength of Google servers established around the world. May Google keep improving as a search engine with time and go forward towards its goal to make all of world knowledge accessible to human kind.