How Does Google Operate?
Google is a web search engine that people use billions of times a day. It searches through millions of web pages to find information that users want. It organizes and orders search results to provide the most relevant and dependable sources of information. Google is a top technology company and its dominance has led to concerns about its power and influence over online information. The company has developed numerous other products, including email, maps, a social network, video, photo storage and more. Its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
The main product that Google is best known for is search. When a user enters a query, the search engine examines all potentially matching web pages in a matter of seconds, displaying the most relevant page first. The search process is incredibly complex, but it is constantly improved to provide the most useful results for each query.
Unlike the file systems on your computer, the vast majority of web pages are not stored in one location. Instead, each page is fetched and added to Google’s massive database of web pages by a program called Googlebot (also known as a crawler or spider). In addition, Google constantly adds new pages to its index from a variety of sources.
Once it has a complete listing of all the pages on the internet, Google then creates an index that can be searched in a fraction of a second. This is done by using a set of rules that determines the importance of each page in its search algorithm. Each year, these rules are updated to try to improve the quality of the results.
When a search is made, the algorithm searches the entire database for matches to the query, and returns those matching pages in descending order of relevance. Google is able to process billions of queries each day and still return results in less than a second. This is made possible by the fact that each query is compared to a small number of other queries in the same category — for example, all searches that involve the word “Chicago.”
Other parts of Google’s operation include a series of 11 data centers worldwide that contain hundreds of thousands of servers (basically multiprocessor personal computers and hard drives in specially constructed racks). The data is stored on three proprietary pieces of software code: GFS, Bigtable and MapReduce.
Google is continually improving and expanding its services. Some of its more recent innovations include voice search, which lets users enter a search query by speaking, and semantic search, which attempts to understand the meaning behind a user’s query rather than just matching keywords. The company is also developing artificial intelligence, which may eventually be used to assist in the Google search engine. As the Google algorithm grows smarter, it can serve increasingly useful results to users, and the company’s goal is to have a computer understand natural language better than humans.
