Google's How Search Works
Just when you thought Google couldn't come up with another way to set itself apart, along comes its animated site, "How Search Works." This site basically asks the age old question, what starts with 30 trillion individual pages, is constantly growing, and can give you the one answer you were looking for - in seconds?
The answer, of course, is search, specifically Google search, and with its new animated site at http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/ you can find out everything you ever wanted to know about how Google actually goes about finding what you're looking for.
You're going to want to see this for yourself, but here's a quick synopsis:
It all starts with crawling. Google sends out spiders, who literally crawl the web, looking for search terms and strings, and sorting their relevance by a number of different factors. Then all this data is indexed. That index only takes up about 100 million gigabytes. I don't even want to think of something that big, much less looking for my data in it!
Then the story moves on to algorithms. This is the deep magic of Google, and why it has stood out among search engines almost from its inception. It just has a better way of figuring out which pages are most likely to give you the information you're looking for. The algorithms include things like synonyms, spelling, query understanding, and methodology.
Then, using over 200 factors, including freshness of content, site pages and quality, safety, and user context, Google will determine which pages to give you back, and in what order.
Google Labs - and I want to know who those guys are and what planet they're from! - is constantly refining, tweaking, and rethinking its methodology. And you're even invited to tour the lab as you hunt around the animation.
As I said, this is an ultra-simplified, boiled-down description of the animation, and you can browse through any number of more detailed insights as you explore the site.
So if you've ever been curious about how it all works at Google - stop over and find out for yourself!
The answer, of course, is search, specifically Google search, and with its new animated site at http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/ you can find out everything you ever wanted to know about how Google actually goes about finding what you're looking for.
You're going to want to see this for yourself, but here's a quick synopsis:
It all starts with crawling. Google sends out spiders, who literally crawl the web, looking for search terms and strings, and sorting their relevance by a number of different factors. Then all this data is indexed. That index only takes up about 100 million gigabytes. I don't even want to think of something that big, much less looking for my data in it!
Then the story moves on to algorithms. This is the deep magic of Google, and why it has stood out among search engines almost from its inception. It just has a better way of figuring out which pages are most likely to give you the information you're looking for. The algorithms include things like synonyms, spelling, query understanding, and methodology.
Then, using over 200 factors, including freshness of content, site pages and quality, safety, and user context, Google will determine which pages to give you back, and in what order.
Google Labs - and I want to know who those guys are and what planet they're from! - is constantly refining, tweaking, and rethinking its methodology. And you're even invited to tour the lab as you hunt around the animation.
As I said, this is an ultra-simplified, boiled-down description of the animation, and you can browse through any number of more detailed insights as you explore the site.
So if you've ever been curious about how it all works at Google - stop over and find out for yourself!
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