Google is the most popular and widely used search engine in the world. Using Google has become an important part of our lives. Today, we carry Google in our pockets and use it for everything from “knowing movie reviews” to “understanding gravitational waves.” At some point of the time we all have wondered, how Google comes up with amazing results for our query within no time. Let’s understand, how exactly Google does it.
But before that, you need to know how the Internet, web page, Google and user fit all together. Let us take an example: What do you do when you have a query and don’t know which books in the library have the information you need? Obviously, you take help of a librarian. A librarian understands your query and comes up with the best books matching your description by going through numerous books. The Internet works in the similar fashion. The Internet is like a library, websites are like books, and Google acts as a librarian.
Google’s follows two steps to provide relevant results to your query.
1. Crawling & Indexing
2. Ranking
CRAWLING & INDEXING:
Crawling is a process carried out to find new and updated pages. Crawling isn’t an easy job because there are billions of web pages worldwide. Google uses a huge set of computers to crawl these billions of web pages with the help of a program. This program is called as Googlebot. It is also known as a spider, bot or robot. Computer programs decide three things for a website:
● Which page to crawl
● How frequently to crawl
● How many pages to fetch
Spiders begin with fetching a couple of pages, and then they follow the links on that couple of pages and fetch the page they point to and follow all the links on those pages and so on until almost all web pages are covered. Google gathers web pages during the crawling process to create an index. This index is similar to an index present in the back of a book. Google index consists of words and their locations.
RANKING:
Whenever you Google search, algorithms look up your keywords in the index to find the appropriate web pages. For a search query, there are hundreds of web pages. In order to show the best web pages at the top and low-quality ones in the last, Google ranks the pages. Currently, there are more than two hundred ranking factors that Google uses to rank a page. Some of the most important ranking signals are given below:
● Content Quality
● Backlinks
● Mobile Friendly
● Speed
● Social Signals
● Security (HTTPS)
● User Experience
