The most commonly used definition of search engine is, “a computer program that allows you to find and retrieve information.” But this is a common misconception. A search engine is much more than that. In fact, it’s not even a program at all. It’s a type of database.
Is the search engine that you trust that of Google? Do you trust it to be accurate? Do you trust that it only shows you the right results? Do you trust Google to not give yourself, or companies that pay them, more importance than others?
It’s time to learn about the inner workings of Google Search. We’re going to give you a peek under the hood – the way Google Search works is actually very simple. The real challenge is getting you to see it this way, or convincing you to stop believing everything you see on the internet.. Read more about how search engine algorithm works and let us know what you think.
Google’s search engine is technically complex.
Hundreds (if not thousands) of different factors are taken into account for a search engine to determine what to put where.
It’s like a mysterious black box, and few know exactly what’s inside.
The good news, however, is that search engines are actually very easy to understand.
We may not know all the factors (out of hundreds or thousands), but we don’t have to.
I’m going to tell you about a simple method that will help you please Google, rank higher and get more traffic to your website.
I’ll also tell you about some of the latest developments, like RankBrain, which helps Google guess what you’re actually looking for (even if you didn’t type it in).
First, I will explain how the Google search engine works, so you can see that it is not as hard to understand as you might think.
How do search engines crawl web pages?
Google’s first job is to surf the Internet.
These are small automated programs or bots that scour the web for new information.
Spiders take notes on your site, from the titles you use to the text on each page, to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who would like to find you.
At first glance, this seems like a simplification.
This is not insignificant considering that there are now over 1.8 billion websites on the internet and thousands of new ones are added every day.
The first huge task is to find new data, record what it is, and then store that information (with some precision) in a database.
The next challenge for Google is how best to match and display the information in its database when someone enters a search query. Scaling up, however, is becoming a problem.
Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches per day, and this number is increasing every year.
This means that the information in its database must be correctly classified, grouped and displayed in less than a second after someone expects it.
Time is of the essence here, because speed is of the essence, as Marissa Mayer said over a decade ago when she was at Google.
She said that when they were able to speed up the Google Maps homepage (by making it smaller), traffic increased by 10% in seven days and 25% after a few weeks.
Google has won the search engine race because of its capabilities:
- Find and save more information
- Get more accurate results
- Does both tasks faster than any other search engine
One of the reasons why Google is on top is the accuracy of its results.
The information shown is likely to be more relevant to what the user is actually looking for.
Think of it this way.
When you type something into Google, you expect something. It can be a simple answer, like. For example, the weather in your city, or it could be more complicated, for example. B. How does the Google search engine really work?
Google’s results are generally more responsive to these searches than those of other search engines. The information was the best of the best.
This breakthrough goes back to the original theory that Google’s co-founders were working on in college.
Why are links important to Google?
The co-founders of Google were still at Stanford in 1998 when they published a paper titled PageRank Citation Rank: Brings order to the internet.
Try it – you can read the full article here!
The PageRank breakthrough was easy.
Research papers are often classified by the number of references given to them. The more they received, the more authoritative they were considered to be on the subject.
Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to apply the same rating system to information on the Internet. They used the backlinks as a proxy for votes. The more links a page received, the more authority it was considered to have on a particular topic.
Of course, they didn’t just look at the number of links. They also took into account quality in terms of who was linking.
If you z. B. get two links from two different sites, the one with more authority on the topic is more valuable.
They also took relevance into account to better assess the quality of the links.
For example, if your site is about dog food, links from other pages or sites that are about things related to dogs or dog food are more valuable than links that are about truck tires.
External links (links from other sites) are also more valuable than internal links (links to different pages on your site).
Before we go any further, you should know that these concepts date back more than two decades.
PageRank may have been important a few years ago, but a lot has changed since then. So you’re obviously not worried about that today.
One of the reasons is the evolution of new algorithms, especially RankBrain.
What is RankBrain and how does it work?
Greg Corrado, an engineer at Google, first learned about RankBrain in 2015:
RankBrain is now the third most important signal influencing search results.
Google has been working on this technology for years so that the search engine can handle the huge increase in volume without sacrificing accuracy.
RankBrain’s secret sauce is that it uses artificial intelligence to constantly learn how to improve performance.
So the more new information or user searches it processes, the more accurate it becomes.
In 2010, for example, Google’s algorithm could have as many as 10,000 variations or subsignals, according to Search Engine Land. That’s a lot!
As you can imagine, it’s incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to manage all of this in the blink of an eye.
This is where RankBrain comes to the rescue.
In general, the two most important ranking factors are:
- References (and quotes)
- Words (content and requirements)
Message: This changes over time, and these are not the only factors involved. Speed plays an important role in Google’s rankings, as does vital web data.
RankBrain remains an essential component. It is helpful to analyze or understand the connections between these links and the content so that Google can understand the context of the search. This is often called semantic search.
Let’s say you type in the word engineer salary.
Think about it. What kind of engineering salary are you looking for?
It can be civil, electrical, mechanical or even software work.
Therefore, Google needs to take into account several factors to understand what exactly you are looking for.
Suppose the following events have occurred in the past few years:
- You’re studying computer science.
- Your IP address indicates that you are on the campus of Stanford University.
- You follow technical journalists on Twitter.
- You read TechCrunch almost every day.
- Last week, you googled software engineer jobs.
Google is able to aggregate all this random data. It’s like a bunch of puzzle pieces suddenly falling into place.
So now Google knows which engineer salaries it should show you, even if you never asked about software engineer salaries.
Plus, Google now answers your questions before you even ask them.
For example, now do a general search for something like pizza.
So, what do you see?
Above you can see the typical ads.
However, the local results under the ads assume that you are asking where to buy a pizza.
The knowledge graph on the far right contains just about every pizza fact and figure you can think of.
RankBrain processes and filters all this data to give you answers before you even ask for them.
Change the search query slightly (as in this case for pizza hut) and the search engine results page (SERP) will change with the new information.
Now you know how the Google search engine really works.
You don’t have to be an expert, but understanding the basics can help you better understand how to give your customers exactly what they want (to get higher rankings and more traffic).
Here are some important things to consider.
How to improve your Google ranking Solving people’s problems
People type in searches on Google to get an answer to any question.
If they are looking for an answer, they have a question.
If they have a problem, they have a problem.
So your main job is to solve someone else’s problem.
In theory, it’s as simple as that. If you solve someone else’s problem better than someone else, you’ll get better reviews and more visitors.
Let’s look at some examples so you can see how this works in real life.
Someone comes home after a long day at work. All they want to do is eat a quick bite and spend time with their family or watch a new series on Netflix.
Before they manage to prepare a meal, they try to run the sink and discover that it is clogged.
Too bad.
But it’s late and they don’t want to call a plumber. Instead, they go to Google and type how to unclog a drain into a search.
And this is what they see:
There you go.
At the top of the page is an ad seeking a plumber (in case you want to hire a professional).
Then there is a reply window with step-by-step instructions that Google says have helped others. So you can fix your sink without even leaving this page!
Below are related questions that others often ask (and their answers).
All this makes you wonder: How do you create something that helps solve a user’s problem?
I’ll answer that question in a moment, but for the record, here’s what you shouldn’t do:
Keyword density is an old tactic that was relevant back when Google’s algorithm was dumb and static. With RankBrain, Google has become a genius bordering on genius.
So keyword stuffing, as in 1999, will hurt you in the long run. As you can see, it’s a terrible answer or solution to someone’s problem.
Next, there are a few places on the page that you should pay special attention to.
For example, the Title and Meta Description tags are used by Google to give an official answer about the page.
These are two elements that also appear in the SERPs when someone types in their search query.
It makes sense to use the main theme in these areas, so everyone knows exactly what your site is about.
Want to see where this text came from?
Just right click on the page to show the source code. For example, my home page looks like this:
At the top of the code you will see the title tag and the meta description.
I also use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to add these additional fields in the WordPress backend.
So all you have to do is write a specific title and description in plain text (instead of getting your hands dirty with code).
Otherwise, the actual content of the page should be written for people (not for keyword stuffing to fool the search engines).
Instead, the content of your page should look like this:
I wrote a detailed answer to help someone solve a complicated problem (keyword search).
Although this is a complicated issue, I tried to give them a simple step-by-step solution so that they could solve the problem as soon as possible.
Now Google even takes into account page usage data to determine the usefulness of your content.
Suppose someone clicked on your site via Google, but was put off by poor design or hard-to-read content. So they immediately go back to Google to look for another result.
This is a bad sign! Google determines that you were not a happy searcher. Maybe Google will try to find other results to swap with this one so everyone is happy.
That’s why I also divide paragraphs into paragraphs and include lots of images. The goal is to help people find what they are looking for quickly.
I want them to read the page faster and take in the information more easily, so they stay on the page longer and don’t jump back.
This is the key to a good ranking in search engines. Give people what they want, get them to stay engaged or come back for more, and Google will be happier as a result.
Let’s go back to our clogged pipe example to see how it works in a different context.
These are all very good results!
In any case, the person who created the page in question gave a detailed answer to the general problem.
Let’s focus on the second SERP result, 7 brilliant ways to clog a sewer (pictured) from Yahoo to see how they managed to come second for such a popular search.
It seems like this could be a good outcome, as it gives us a chance to try different methods and take pictures to see exactly what is going on.
Let’s click on them to see what they offer.
Overall, very good!
It provides the user with high quality content that helps them solve their problem. The better your content, the more links or upvotes it will get if others find it useful too.
Links and other social citations or signals help alert Google. This tells the search engine that your site is booming and that it should start paying attention to your site for these topics.
Your site will get more exposure, move up in the rankings, be seen by more people, get more links or votes and continue to grow.
This is where the ingenuity of Google’s process comes in.
It makes people happy by giving them exactly what they are looking for. If you do it right, it gives you an extra edge that can suddenly skyrocket, driving traffic to your website.
How the Google search engine works Supplement
Google’s search engine is one of the most advanced technologies in the world.
It processes massive amounts of data at lightning speed to give people exactly what they’re looking for within seconds.
If you stick to the basics, search engines are actually very easy to understand.
They want to help people find what they are looking for.
People use Google to find answers and solutions. They have something on their mind and want an answer that will help them solve the problem so they can get on with their day.
How Google finds and delivers this information is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO), and thus crucial to the growth of your online business.
Now that you know how Google works, how will you use this information?
- SEO – Unlocks a large amount of SEO traffic. To see real results.
- Content marketing – our team creates epic content that gets shared, attracting links and traffic.
- Paid media – effective paid strategies with a clear return on investment.
Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t use “black magic” to decide which page appears at the top of the search results. You might think it does, but it doesn’t. Instead, Google has a more logical, technical system that relies on hundreds, if not thousands of factors. We can’t cover every detail in a blog article, but we can give you a look deep under the hood.. Read more about search engine techniques and let us know what you think.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Google’s search algorithm work?
The Google search algorithm is a set of rules that Google uses to determine which websites are the most relevant for a given search query.
How does Google search engine return search results?
Google search engine returns search results by using a ranking algorithm.
How Google search engine works so fast?
Google search engine is the most popular search engine in the world. It is a free service that provides users with access to a wide range of information on the Internet. Google’s success has been attributed to its ability to organize vast amounts of data and provide relevant results for queries.
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