The stages of Google Instant Search:
1. Before Search
The history of a search query begins long before you enter it into Google. Software robots, or “spiders,” find web pages that will later appear in Google search results. Google programs store data about them in a data center. The Internet is a book with millions of pages, and our job is to index it.
- The index takes up more than 100 million gigabytes
- It has already taken more than 1 million hours of computing to prepare it
2. During Search
As soon as you enter a query, Google’s algorithm begins searching for the information you need.
- Before it returns any results, your query travels 1,500 miles at close to the speed of light — a billion miles per hour — visiting data centers around the world along the way.
- Even before you can hit Enter, Google starts showing suggestions and relevant search results to help you find the answer you need as quickly as possible. This feature is called Live Search.
3. Ranking
More than 200 criteria are used to evaluate your query, choosing the most relevant results from millions of options. Google makes more than 500 improvements to its search algorithm every year.
Examples of criteria:
- Relevance of website content
- Number of pages linked to the site and the importance of these links
- Words on the web page
- Keyword synonyms
- Spelling
- Quality of website content
- URL and title of the web page
- Type of information requested: web page, image, video, article, personal result, etc.
- Personalization
- Results recommended by friends and acquaintances
4. Result
Search results are arranged on the page in descending order of relevance. A preview will also help you make a choice faster: hover your mouse over the arrow that pops up to the right of the site title and description to see a screenshot of the page. The image loads in 1/10th of a second on average.
Facts:
- Google processes billions of search queries every day.
- Since 2003, Google has received 450 billion unique queries – keywords and phrases used for the first time in a search.
- 16% of all queries per day are new.
