Google is the most dominant search engine in the world. Its success has generated criticism and concern about the company’s power to influence online information.
The way people use search engines is constantly evolving. New trends, usage patterns, queries and so on are continuously being examined by Google engineers. Thousands of experiments are carried out to determine what changes may be useful for users and how they can be implemented.
Step 1 Crawling: When a user types in their query, Google will search the Internet for pages that match that term. It will also search for pages that contain information about the subject, and it will then store those in its database called the “Google index”.
Once it has a list of web pages that match their query, Google uses a complex algorithm to decide which ones are the most relevant. It also looks at the keywords used in the page and other factors that are not directly related to the keyword.
In order to show the most relevant results, Google also takes into account things like location and language. The search engine then serves the results in descending order of relevance to the user.
It has 11 data centres worldwide that are interconnected to create one of the most powerful and extensive databases on the planet. The computers in each centre are connected to the internet via a fiber-optic network.
The computers in these data centres process data on millions of web pages and store them in a big database. This database is what Google calls its index and it contains billions of records, which it tries to sift through in less than a second.
Step 2 Indexing: Once the pages are in the Google index, they can be accessed by other websites that use Google’s search service. These web pages can then be linked to a particular page in the Google index, and they will be given a higher ranking than other pages that do not link to them.
A few of these links to a website are automatically included in the list of search results for each query. The number of links to a web page is also an important factor in how relevant that site is.
How long the web page has been around: Pages with an established history get more relevance from Google than new ones do. The page is also likely to be linked to by other pages on the same topic, which means it will be more relevant to other searchers.
Meta titles: The title of a web page is an important factor in how relevant it is to a user’s query. It also appears in search results as a small blurb that is displayed next to the page’s URL.
A website’s meta description is another important ranking signal. It can be found on the page’s meta information box and it is what will appear as the small blurb below the page’s title in Google search results. It is a good idea to write a relevant and engaging meta description for your website, because it will help to attract visitors to your website.