Google releases “How Search Works” video
Recently, Google released a new “How Search Works” video, nine years after their original video. Google has been trying to be more transparent in recent years, and this is definitely a step in the right direction. The 5-minute video explains the history of the Google search, indexing/mapping pages, ranking pages, and displaying them in result of the search. For instance, Google has an index of hundreds of billions of pages. Every time a search is done, Google tries to find the most relevant pages. Hundreds of factors go into ranking search results, including whether or not the search word comes up on the page, where on the page the word is, how many links go to that page, location, and time of the page’s creation. Google’s algorithms even recognize scam sites and remove them before displaying the search results.
The video also explains how Google constantly makes changes to search. In fact, one in every seven searches is something that’s never been typed into the search bar before! They compare and evaluate different search results, and give feedback about the quality of the results. They follow a set of guidelines to make sure their evaluations are fair and consistent.
We learned a relatively simple version of PageRank in this course. Google, however, sifts through billions of pages to rank the ones that will provide the most useful results, and they are constantly changing how they do this. Although full transparency can’t be expected, this video and article reveal how complicated ranking pages for a major search engine is. Hundreds of factors go into it. Google is always trying to improve their users’ experiences with the search engine; their page ranking algorithms will do the most possible to give users the best results.
https://9to5google.com/2019/10/24/how-google-search-works/