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Google Search

This guide provides a description of how Google's search feature works and how users can get the search engine to work for them.

Google's Mission:

"Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Google: A Brief History:

 

Indexing & Crawling:

"A web crawler is an internet bot that consistently browses the World Wide Web, generally for the aim of web indexing." (Patil & Patil, 2016, p. 220)

The internet is enormous and new websites are being added every day. In fact, according to InternetLiveStats.com, as of August 29, 2018 at 11:12 am EST, there were 1,907,508,320 and counting websites online. Since the creation of the internet in 1991 (website count=1), that is an increase of 190,750,831,900%!

Every second:

  • 69,109 Google searches are being performed
  • 8,169 Tweets are sent
  • 75,250 YouTube videos are viewed

There are different types of web crawlers and Google gives website creators options for which webcrawlers index their sites, how those sites are indexed, and give them an opt-out option to prevent webcrawlers from indexing the site at all.

The types of web crawlers according to Patil & Patil (2016, p. 221-222) are:

  • focused
  • incremental
  • distributed
  • form focused
  • parallel

References:

  1. Patil, Y. & Patil, S. (January 2016). Review of web crawlers with specification and working. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering, (5)1, 220-223. DOI 10.17148/IJARCCE.2016.5152
  2. Total number of websites. (August, 29 2018). [Live Count of Active Websites, 2018]. Data retrieved using Real Time Statistics Project's Single Unit Isotype and Live Isotype software. Retrieved from http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/ 
  3. In 1 second, each and every second, there are... (August 29, 2018). [Live Count of Google searches, Tweets, and YouTube views, 2018]. Data retrieved using Real Time Statistics Project's Single Unit Isotype and Live Isotype software. Retrieved from http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/

How Google Search Works: The Video:

 

The Google Algorithm:

All those billions of websites out there probably contain identical keywords and strings of text. So, how does Google know which websites to pull from their massive index and put into the order you see on your results page?

The answer is in their algorithm. 

Or rather multiple algorithm. 

Google considers many elements when determining how to rank the results your search may return.

They have developed algorithms to understand the natural language elements of your search, including misspelled words, synonyms, and the nature of your question (broad or specific).

Other algorithms track the usability of the websites being pulled for your search and whether they are being linked to or from by other reputable sites. These algorithms are also being tweaked to sense spam or misleading web content so those sites are ranked lower in your search results. 

Google Search algorithms are constantly changing to meet the rapid evolution of online content creation. 

Google. (2018). How search works. Google Search. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/