Google Search Engine

The fact that is testimony to Google's supremacy over the Internet is its transcendence from being a name to being a verb in the English dictionary. All over the world, whenever people need information on just about anything under the sun, they 'Google' it! Since the first day I became a part of Google fan base, I have been curious about how this website works to deliver its services with such consistency and accuracy. That is when I 'Googled' about the search engine's inner workings.

History

The entity that rules the Internet today had modest beginnings (like all Silicon Valley start ups) in a garage in Menlo Park, California. The idea behind Google has roots in the research project of company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, when they were pursuing their PhD at Stanford University in circa 1996. They wrote an algorithm for web search (patented as 'PageRank' later), that weighed the importance of a page on the net, according to the number of links that were directed towards it. Instead of just searching for relevant keyword density like conventional web search engines, they gave importance to incoming links towards the page and the relevancy of those pages.

Google domain name finally got registered in 1997 and since then it has grown by leaps and bounds to become the premier web search engine on the Internet. Through acquisitions and innovations, Google has inculcated a lot more services to its web search features like YouTube, Google Earth and the recent launch of Google TV. Google offers advertising solutions through its Google AdSense and Google Adwords programs. Google's revenue is generated through advertisements placed by it on websites that submit themselves to their programs.

How Does the Google Search Engine Work?

The aim of Sergey Brin and Larry Page in designing the algorithm was to build the perfect search engine that could fetch the most relevant information to any query. The secret behind Google's working is its web crawler bot which travels through the length of breadth of the Internet, indexing every new page that gets published.

How does the crawler discover new pages? The crawler looks for new links on pre-indexed pages and crawls them as soon as they become live. Every page that is indexed, goes through a range of 'checks'. The number and content of web pages linking to that page is checked (which decides its importance) and it goes through a rigorous quality check in terms of content, code and other features.

A snapshot of the page gets saved in the Google cache, which is located on one of the Google servers, in the many data centers it has around the world. When you search for anything, Google searches its vast cached database of pages on its local server, applying various filters of relevance, to provide the most accurate of search results! Now Google even provides a personalized search, whereby your results are customized according to usage history. Google handles more than a billion queries daily in this manner! There are more than 100 parameters including incoming links, content and page history that are given importance when displaying a page in a search query. All this happens within fractions of seconds. This was a very short summary of how Google works.

Google will of course never reveal the algorithm that makes it possible for it to deliver accurate results and the technology that makes the delivery of billions of search queries possible, as it is its trade secret. It is constantly evolving as a search engine, while making new changes in strategy like the introduction of the 'Google Instant' feature recently, which delivers results as you type! It is also a demonstration of the brute strength of Google servers established around the world. May Google keep improving as a search engine with time and go forward towards its goal to make all of world knowledge accessible to human kind.