How can google look through every possible website when you make a google search?
In: Technology
TLDR: it doesn’t
Google maintains a database that it uses for its searches called an index.
Its tools scrape websites (web crawlers) looking for keywords and other things that it then notes in the database.
When you do a Google Search what it’s actually doing is looking up that text search in its own database which is why it’s so fast.
The secret sauce for Google is how it optimizes this index to get good results. Exactly what Google is doing in that index is a bit of a dark art, as its somewhat of a trade secret. Googles ability to generate effect searches is ultimately what caused it to dominant the market and push other search engines like Lycos and Alta Vista out of the market.
Reverse engineering what they do though is possible.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process where web developers use the knowledge they have about how Google works to tune websites to get that site to appear higher on a Google search.
It doesn’t. That would be way too much calculation to perform in such a short time.
Instead what Google does is use an “index” which they constructed in advance. Think about an index in a book; instead of looking up all instances of the word “rutabaga” for example by searching through every page, they looked through every page in advance and just listed down their page numbers. It saves a lot of time when someone wants to know wherever rutabagas were mentioned. Google can make this massive index in advance and then construct the response to an arbitrary search query simply by referencing that index which can all be kept in massive amounts of active memory making it blindingly fast.
Another trick is that Google used to say it “found 30 million matches in 0.15 seconds” or whatever. Their systems might say there are that many possible returns but they only actually *show* you the one page of links at a time. So if they look at the entry for rutabaga and it says there are 30 million mentions and you just read off the first ten page numbers it might *seem* really impressive to say you found 30 million matches in that time period.
except they don’t always show the most relevant. they show you whoever paid the most to be shown first.
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