Explained: How the Google Search Engine Really Works
Sep 02, 2021 
3 mins 
Search engines are really complex and this is true for Google.
There are probably thousands of factors that Google takes into effect to decide what webpage to rank in their search results.
Even though Google doesn’t share exactly how they rank search results it’s pretty easy to understand. Even without knowing every factor, Google uses in ranking search results.
Stick to the basics and your site can rank higher and bring in more traffic.
How Google Crawls the Web
Search engines crawl the web with bots called “spiders.” They crawl across the web looking for all the information that is out there.
These spiders record the information on your site. They look at your titles, headings, and the content you write. They want to know who you are, what you do, and who would be interested in you.
It’s a big undertaking to crawl all the web’s content, find all the new content, and then archive it on Google servers. There are almost 2 billion sites online with more being added every day.
Google then has to figure out how to match the data they’ve crawled to user’s searches. That’s not an easy feat with billions of searches each day and 15% of all searches are new that have never been searched before.
All of that has to happen in the split second that you enter a search and get your results.
Google has become the leader in search engines for a few reasons.
- It’s able to archive more information
- Delivers accurate results
- Do 1 & 2 really fast
(Having Google search built into Chrome browser and all Android phones also help)
Google’s search is so advanced it can anticipate what you are searching for and even answer questions in the search results.
It Started with Links
In 1998 the co-founders of Google came up with PageRank. The idea of PageRank is to grade websites by the links that point to them. The grading includes both quantity (number of links) quality (links from domains that have high amounts of links to them).
The relevance of the links also matters. If your website is about boat rentals and you have a lot of links from pages about lawn fertilizer they would have low value to you. Instead if you had links from pages about boating and boat rentals those links would be of greater value to your site.
Internal links on your site are helpful to visitors and indicating what pages are important. The external links from other sites carry more weight.
RankBrain Rolls Out
RankBrain was confirmed in 2015 by Google. RankBrain uses AI to continually improve search results. The algorithm gets more accurate over time as it processes more searches.
RankBrain is what powers the Google Instant search predictions. It is trying to not only match the best content with your search but also uncover the intent of your search.
