How Google Search Works 2023
Though there are many search engines available, Google is by far the most popular and advanced. In fact, Google Search is so universal that “Googling” something has become synonymous with “searching the web” for something. Though practically everyone knows about Google Search, very few know how it actually works. This is because there is a lot of technical jargon and regular updates to the process. In this brief article brought to you by iBoost Web, we offer a quick summary of how Google Search works.
Crawling the Web
There are well over a billion active websites as of the writing of this article, and the number of webpages is constantly growing. The first stage of Google Search involves finding existing websites. In fact, Google uses software known as web crawlers, or Googlebot, to constantly look for new webpages as well as updates to existing webpages.
Googlebot uses an algorithm to methodically comb through the data and follow links throughout the website. Googlebot then downloads all of the new information. This data will be gathered for the next step: Indexing.
Indexing the Information
Once Googlebot, or the web crawler, has investigated and found new information, it stores this data in Google’s massive database. The next step is to make sense of the new information. This is also called indexing the information.
Indexing includes processing and analyzing the data. It factors in elements such as textual context, keywords, sentence structures, images, videos, links, and more. During this process, Google also determines whether the content violates policies. For instance, it can determine whether the page is a duplicate or whether the content is harmful or goes against local laws.
It should be noted, however, that not every webpage is indexed or even crawled. Some webpages only allow authorized users and others have poor quality, missing elements, and design flaws that prevent proper crawling and indexing.
