The Innerworkings Of A Google Search

5 minutes read

Google has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We use it to search for the nearest gas station when we’re running low; we use it to look for the best local seafood restaurant; we use to find out the movie schedules at the nearby cinema. It is so deeply ingrained in our day-to-day activities that it has become more of a need than a convenience.

How often do people use Google? According to the search engine giant, it handles 5.48 billion searches DAILY, on average, putting it at beyond 2 trillion searches in a year. In fact, we have made ‘Google’ into an action word, meaning to search for something online. We use Google for so many things, and yet are we truly familiar with how it works? In this post, we will try and take a look at a simplified version of how Google works to provide us the information we need in real time.

Crawling the Web

When you do a Google search, you are not searching for information throughout the entirety of the web. Rather you are searching the information that Google has indexed and cached from the web. Essentially, Google builds a virtual library of information from which it provides results for search queries. This library is built through algorithms called spiders. Spiders are designed to crawl and fetch webpages, identify links on those pages, and crawl and fetch the pages the links direct to, in a continuous and endless process.

That is how Google builds its library of information, and how it increasingly improves search result accuracy. When you type ‘digital marketing company in UAE’ on Google, the search engine combs through its library for information relating to the keywords used for the query, and produces the search pages it believes are relevant to it. Often, for a single query, Google can produce hundreds of thousands of results.

Determining Relevance

To ensure that it consistently provides accurate results to search queries, Google utilises sophisticated search quality algorithms. These algorithms help the search engine determine the context of your query, and provide you with the most relevant results. The slightest change in its core algorithms can have a significant impact on search engine results, which is why SEO specialists are always watching for any activity indicating a change in Google’s delivery of results.

To ensure that your website appears for relevant searches, you can start with simple optimisation techniques such as organically integrating your keyword into your online content, placing emphasis on user experience, and continuously improving the quality of your website.

Google currently uses more than 200 ranking factors to determine website quality, but one of the factors that it feels strongly about is content. The search engine evaluates how often a website refreshes its content with relevant and valuable updates. Based on ‘freshness,’ the search engine will seek to provide users with the most up-to-date content.

It also uses user history to determine the context of a search, as well as the geographical location of the user, to provide a more localised result.

All this happens within a span of around 0.125 seconds, which is the amount of time Google takes to provide search results. If you want to know about how you can improve the quality of your website, take the time to contact the SEO experts at USEO. Our SEO consultants are more than ready to assist with your queries.