It has been a while site I talked about this so I thought it was time to revisit the subject of how Google works.
I’m not going to get into ranking algorithms or link profiles or other industry terminology. Instead I want to focus on how Google does what it does – that is return millions of search results to a searcher in a fraction of a second.
I mean, think about that for a second. Google is serving hundreds of millions of requests per day yet the consistently return results for those searches in milliseconds. Can you imagine the power able to do that?
If not let me explain how such a system works so you can understand the complexity of it.
First, open a Google page and launch a search – anything will do. Let’s try “Pizza” – a single word query – don’t use the quotes.
I got 679 million results in 1/4 of a second how about you? I also get a map with a list of results, some sponsored listings and some organic results. Some related searches and even some previews of the sites listed.
Now let’s break it down a bit. Here’s how basic information retrieval works:
1) The system (in this case Google servers) recieve a response for a query (pizza). Google then launches a request to it’s servers to scan the database and return all relevant results for that term.
2) At the same time Google servers are also querying the other Google products – Google maps/places for corresponding results (based on your location), Google Adwords servers – for matching ads, Youtube, for matching videos plus books, news, Google Plus, and every other publicly accessible Google product. And each one of these products is returning what it considers to be the best match to your query.
3) Now Google is combining and sorting results, removing results it doesn’t consider as relevant as the others, and determining the order to place those results based on your search history, preferences and so on.
4) Google then returns those filtered ordered results to you IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND.
Think about that for a second. I’ve greatly simplified the process by only showing you 4 steps but basically that is the process Google and other search engines use for each and every query done.
Now some estimates have pegged Google searches at 34,000 per second! That means that every second Google goes through this same process 34,000 or more times every second!
The computing power here is staggering. We are talking several hundred thousand server computers working in unison to create these search results because Google does indeed generate them “on the fly”. There are no canned responses happening here. Until you hit the enter key, that search does not exist.
And recently Google added more functionality to their search engine. I don’t know if you have noticed but now when you begin to type a search in, Google is already returning results. In as little as 2 or 3 letters you can start to see a search results page. The more letters and words you type the more the results are changed AS YOU TYPE to more closely match what you are looking for.
Again, extremely impressive in my books, considering what I said above about how simple information retrieval works.
So the next time you visit Google or any other search engine for that matter, keep in mind what I’ve said here – this is no trivial thing they do. It’s extremely complex and incredibly fast.