Google impacts daily lives in countless ways, chief among them being its search engine. The Verge’s 2017 video titled ‘How Google Search Works’ provides a deep dive into the complex process behind Google’s search operations. Here, we will explore this topic at length. This complex matrix has been simplified into four main steps for our understanding: Crawling, Indexing, Algorithms, and User Interaction.
The process of Google's search engine starts with Crawling. Crawling is the initial step where Google's bots scour the internet, exploring millions, if not billions, of webpages. It verifies the existence of these pages and revisits them periodically to uncover updates or changes, keeping its data current and relevant.
Indexing is the second integral stage in the process. By way of analogy, if the internet is a library, then Google's index would be its catalogue system. In this phase, Google stores and organizes the data gathered during the crawling phase. It categorizes the web pages based on their content and other critical aspects such as keywords and relevance.
Next, Google largely relies on complex Algorithms to rank the pages in its search results. These algorithms constantly evolve, making Google’s search results increasingly accurate over time. They factor in aspects like page relevance, quality of content, user location, and device type among others.
The final part of the Google search matrix is User Interaction. This sector focuses on how users interact with and use Google's search results. The findings from this phase help Google improve its search results, pushing more relevant or popular pages to the forefront.
Aside from explaining the main components of Google's search engine process, the video delves into how Google deals with penalizing spam content. Google penalizes websites that attempt to game its indexing system through tactics like keyword stuffing or hiding text, which provide users with low-quality content.
After discussing the vital parts of Google's search engine and its efforts to promote quality content, let's take a look at real-life application. The most relatable example would be typing a phrase into Google and seeing the generated results. The high-speed, seamless process often belies the complex operations behind it.
Next, let's demystify the idea of page ranking. What determines which page comes first and why? Relevancy determines the ranking of a page in the search results. When you type a phrase into Google’s search bar, the search engine goes through billions of pages in its index to determine which ones are the most relevant to your search.
The prominence of keywords is critical in this process. The more a keyword appears in a webpage, the more likely the page will appear in the search results. In addition, the placement of these keywords is also crucial. It should appear in important areas such as the title and the headers for better visibility.
While keywords play a significant role, they're just part of the equation, Quality also holds immense value. To Google, high-quality pages are ones with relevant, thorough, and fact-based content. These are the type of pages that Google wants to recommend to its users.
When it comes to ranking, another factor that Google considers is usability. Usability and the overall user experience have a considerable influence on the ranking of a page. For instance, if a webpage takes too long to load, it might slide down Google's search results, no matter how good the content.
Let's discuss the influence of location on search results. Google uses the search location to provide the most relevant results. For instance, when an Australian user searches for football, they'll get results related to Australian rules football.
Device type also affects Google’s search results significantly. If a user performs a search on a mobile device, Google will prioritize mobile-friendly pages. On the contrary, if the same search was made on a desktop, device compatibility would not be as much of a concern.
Understanding these factors empowers us to see Google's search engine in a more comprehensive light. It's not just about providing the most relevant results, but also about making the whole experience user-friendly.
Finally, continuous learning is fundamental to Google. The more a user uses Google's search engine, the more it learns from the user's behavior. This learning enables Google to continually refine the search engine’s results and provide a better and more personalized experience for each unique user.
In conclusion, though the process might seem simple to an end-user, Google's search engine process is a highly sophisticated and constantly evolving mechanism. Its multi-layered algorithm considers numerous variables to ensure the most accurate, relevant, and quick results. These intelligent efforts make Google the world-leading search engine that it is today.