The Google Search – Under the hood
In this first week of the year discover Internet’s one of the most significant technology ever developed.
A majority of internet users see a Google Search home page the moment they call their browsers to the screen. Surprisingly, only a pinch of the Google users actually know how a few words query is transmuted into a full-fledged result page aka a Search engine result page (SERP). So take a deep breath and dive in this first week of the year to discover Internet’s one of the most significant technology ever developed.
Google stands tall at the apex of Alexa Traffic rank, an abstract to the fact that Google is the most visited website in the world. Each day Google responds to more than one billion queries of users around the globe from 181 countries in 146 different languages. Keeping hold of such an enormous amount of user traffic is a challenge in itself. The best part is that only a small portion of the users remain unsatisfied from the first search result page.
THE SEARCH ALGORITHM:
The driving technology behind such accurate and lightening fast search results is Google’s patented Search Algorithm. The detailed specifics are of course a company secret (helps Google earn maintain edge over other search engines in the market as well as to away with the spammers and the system’s abuse), yet I have tried to dig the deepest I could. Not every website can be at the top of the search result. Owing to the fact that there exists over millions of links related to a single keyword entered in the search box. It’s the algorithms job to put up only the most relevant information on the top page and other pages to come. This spares the users from churning up the useful bit of information from the from a chunk of less relevant data. Google like other search engines, deploys a set of automated programs called web crawlers or web spiders. What puts Google out of box is its trademarked technology called the “PageRank”. PageRank, the heart of Google search engine is Google’s patented algorithm for searching, was developed back in the days when Google was research project (initially called as “BackRub” as it checked backlinks to compute the site’s importance ) at Stanford under its Co-developers Sergey Brin and Larry Page(hence the name PageRank).
The PageRank :
The PageRank algorithm is an efficient (grown through its evolution) tool in determining the importance of particular website in context to the entered keyword. The entire PangeRank algorithm goes down to one single assumption, that more important sites are likely to receive more links from other quality websites. Thus PageRank rates the relevance of the particular website regarding a particular searched keyword by keeping a record of the total number and quality of links linked to that website.
For the record the relevance of a particular site depends on the following factors :
- The frequency and location of the keyword in the website.
- The number of other websites that the page is linked to.
- The existence of the webpage.
The system is pretty robust as cheating the algorithm is no child’s play. The only way to push up your Page rank is to attract other sites by creating quality and authentic content for your website, and earn links from other websites who find your content useful.
For a deeper insight into search technology kindly check out the next part of the post “The Google Search- Part II” next week at gadgetronica.com.
Sagar
Born and brought up in Gorakhpur, U.P , presently persuing my graduation at Assam University, silchar , Asam. My strength is turning technical mumbo-jumbo into easy to understand language. This is also my interest and passion and sums up what is at the heart of my ability to be the kind of technical writer you need.