How Google Search Works
Video Transcript:
Every day, billions of people come here with questions about all kinds of things.
Sometimes we even get questions about Google Search itself, like how this whole thing actually works.
And while this is a subject entire books have been written about, there is a good chance you're in the market for something a little more concise.
So let's say it's getting close to dinner and you want a recipe for lasagna.
You've probably seen this before.
But let's go a little deeper.
Since the beginning, back when the home page looked like this, Google has been continuously mapping the web, hundreds of billions of pages, to create something called an index.
Think of it as the giant library we look through whenever you do a search for lasagna or anything else.
Now, the word lasagna shows up a lot on the web-- pages about the history of lasagna, articles by scientists whose last name happened to be Lasagna, stuff other people might be looking for.
But if you're hungry, randomly clicking through millions of links is no fun.
This is where Google's ranking algorithms come into play.
First, they try to understand what you're looking for so they can be helpful even if you don't know exactly the right words to use or if your spelling is a little off.
Then they sift through millions of possible matches in the index and automatically assemble a page that tries to put the most relevant information up top for you to choose from.
OK.
Now we have some results.
But how did the algorithms actually decide what made it onto the first page? There are hundreds of factors that go into ranking search results.
So let's talk about a few of them.
You may already know that pages containing the words you search for are more likely to end up at the top.
No surprise there.
But the location of those words, like in the page's title, or in an image's caption, those are factors, too.
There's a lot more to ranking than just words.
Back when Google got started, we looked at how pages linked to each other to better understand what pages were about and how important and trustworthy they seemed.
Today, linking is still an important factor.
Another factor is location, where a search happens.
Because, if you happen to be in Ormea, Italy, you might be looking for information about their annual lasagna festival.
But if you're in Omaha, Nebraska, you probably aren't.
When a web page was uploaded is an important factor, too.
Pages published more recently often have more accurate information, especially in the case of a rapidly developing news story.
Of course, not every site on the web is trying to be helpful.
Just like with robocalls on your phone or spam in your email, there are a lot of sites that only exist to scam.
And every day, scammers upload millions more of them.
So just because InstantVirusDownload.
net lists the words "lasagna recipe" 400 times, that doesn't mean it's going to help you make dinner.
We spend a lot of time trying to stay one step ahead of tricks like these, making sure our algorithms can recognize scam sites and flag them before they make it to your search results page.
So let's review.
Billions of times a day, whenever someone searches for lasagna, or resume writing tips, or how to swaddle a baby, or anything else, Google software locates all the potentially relevant results on the web, removes all the spam, and ranks them based on hundreds of factors, like keywords, links, location, and freshness.
OK.
Good time to take a breath.
This last part is about how we make changes to Search.
And it's important.
Since 1998, when Google went online, people seem to have found our results pretty helpful.
But the web is always changing and people are always searching for new things.
In fact, one in every seven searches is for something that's never been typed into the search box before by anyone ever.
So we're always working on updates to Search, thousands every year.
Which brings up a big question.
How do we decide whether a change is making Search more helpful? Well, one of the ways we evaluate potential updates to Search is by asking people like you.
Every day, thousands of Search quality raters look at samples of Search results side by side, then give feedback about the relevance and reliability of the information.
To make sure those evaluations are consistent, the raters follow a list of Search quality evaluator guidelines.
Think of them as our publicly available guide to what makes a good result good.
Oh, and one last thing to remember.
We use responses from raters to evaluate changes.
But they don't directly impact how Search results are ranked.
So there you have it.
Every time you click Search, our algorithms are analyzing the meaning of the words in your search, matching them to the content on the web, understanding what content is most likely to be helpful and reliable, and then automatically putting it all together in a neatly organized page designed to get you the info you need.
All in, oh, 0.
81 seconds? Wow.
Anyone else ready for dinner? Interested in learning more? We've got a whole website dedicated to how Search works.
Just click right here.
Want to read the Search Quality Rater Guidelines for yourself?
SEO Google instructions for TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, D&H, Bluestar, Cisco Meraki, Cisco, NASA SEWP V, REMC SAVE, CIO-CS, ITES-SW2, 2GIT, PEPPM, CMAS, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Ohio STS
How Real People Make Google Search Better
Video Transcript:
Every year, Google runs hundreds of thousands of tests to see if a change we're considering to Search will actually make it better for the people who use it.
One of the essential ways we test for that is by turning to real people.
We call them Search Quality Raters.
There are over 10,000 of them around the world.
And though the job title sounds simple, what they do is actually quite rigorous work.
It starts with our "Search Quality Evaluator's Guidelines," a publicly available manual every rater studies and is tested on before providing ratings.
This gives raters clear guidance on how to evaluate things like relevance, trustworthiness, and expertise.
Then when we're considering a change to Search, we ask a large number of raters to each review hundreds to thousands of searches.
For each search, raters see results from two versions of Google and then open every link listed to provide a quality rating for each.
Because raters are required to give ratings based on common guidelines, free of personal opinions and beliefs, the rating process demands a lot of additional research, like who an author is and if other reputable sources view them as authorities.
Though a rater's task is to give a rating to each page they see, that one rating doesn't directly affect how that one page will rank in real-world searches.
Instead, we look at all the ratings from all the raters across a wide range of searches to see which version of Google consistently delivered the highest quality and most helpful results.
Last year alone, we ran over 380,000 search quality tests, plus nearly 63,000 with our Search Quality Raters, resulting in more than 3,600 improvements to our search algorithms.
And while our search results can always improve, this process has been very effective over the past 20 years in helping us ensure the changes we make meet the quality standards that people everywhere have come to expect from Google.
SEO Google instructions for TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, D&H, Bluestar, Cisco Meraki, Cisco, NASA SEWP V, REMC SAVE, CIO-CS, ITES-SW2, 2GIT, PEPPM, CMAS, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Ohio STS
How Google Search Continues To Improve Results
Video Transcript:
There is a lot of information on the internet, like a lot a lot.
And at Google, it's our mission to organize it all and connect you with the information that you actually find useful-- like this.
These blue links are web results, a list of web pages ranked according to how relevant they are to what you've searched.
Pretty useful.
But for more than 20 years, we've been constantly working to find new ways to improve search.
Let's say you want to know more about how to bake a carrot cake.
As soon as you start typing, you'll see predicted searches start to appear.
This is called auto complete, a predictive feature that matches what you're typing to common searches to save you time.
And after you've made your search, you might run into other useful features, like featured snippets, which highlight web pages that we think are especially likely to contain relevant information, and knowledge panels, which give you a quick snapshot of facts about people, places, and things, and the relationships between them.
Our goal is for these features to help you find helpful information and web pages right away so you can spend more of your time doing, well, whatever it was that sparked your question in the first place.
But as important as it is that you get your information as quickly as possible, what's even more important is that that information is actually reliable and useful.
That's where our ranking systems come in.
When you type something into search, these systems, which are sometimes called algorithms, try to find matches between what you're searching and what's on the web, considering everything from keywords in your query to how recently the page was published, but no system is perfect, and sometimes ours may miss the mark and show you content that really isn't that relevant or doesn't come from the most reliable sources.
You might think we could just fix the results for that specific search, but with billions of searches per day, there's no way that anyone could manually decide which pieces of content should be ranked above others.
Here's what we do instead.
Make search better.
We do that by coming up with improvements to our systems that we think might help, not just those queries that turn up unreliable or irrelevant results, but a broad range of similar searches.
In 2019 alone, we ended up making more than 3,620 improvements to search, for an average of nearly 10 improvements a day.
These changes help us with ranking our blue link web results and our search features, like auto complete, knowledge panels, and featured snippets.
We also have additional policies that apply to our search features.
Because these features are highlighted in a unique way on the page, these policies cover what's not allowed to appear in them, especially when it comes to information that might be offensive, dangerous, or incorrect.
Our systems are designed to avoid showing content that violates these policies, but every now and then, we do have to remove incorrect or policy violating information from search features ourselves, sometimes when we're alerted to issues based on feedback from our users.
Then we look into what caused the issue, take what we've learned, and keep improving our systems, with the goal of preventing this kind of thing from happening again.
So to sum it all up, no system is perfect.
But at Google, we're working every day to help you find what you're looking for just when you need it, and any other questions that might cross your mind.
SEO Google instructions for TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, D&H, Bluestar, Cisco Meraki, Cisco, NASA SEWP V, REMC SAVE, CIO-CS, ITES-SW2, 2GIT, PEPPM, CMAS, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Ohio STS
How Ads Appear In Google Search
Video Transcript:
When you're on the hunt for something-- say, the perfect camping chair-- you might come to Google for help.
And when you do, we'll end up showing you a lot of information about camping chairs.
A page like this actually displays two types of information related to your search-- search results and ads.
Search results show content from across the web, and which ones appear is determined solely by what Google systems think are most relevant to your query.
No one pays to be included in search results.
Then there's the ads that may appear.
Ads are always clearly labeled to help distinguish them from the search results, but the two actually share something in common.
You're seeing these links because our systems believe they'll be helpful to your search, like a site listed in your search results that reviews the top camping chairs of the year and an ad from a business highlighting its best-selling chairs.
Just like how TV networks run ads to help pay for the programming they produce, ads are how Google is able to keep Search working and free for everyone to use.
But instead of businesses paying just for their ads to be seen, businesses pay Google only when a user interacts with their ad, which does happen.
It turns out that along with the best information we can surface in search results, ads are often an additional helpful way to connect users with the products, services, or businesses they're searching for.
Like a local shop with a sale on camping chairs obviously wants to reach people shopping for camping chairs.
And people like you who are searching for camping chairs will probably be interested in a sale on them.
So when you see that store's ad, you may find it useful, click it, and ultimately purchase a chair.
The business gets a new customer.
Google gets paid for a click.
And you get just the chair you were looking for.
Ads are only displayed in clearly marked sections of the page.
And we only show them if they'll be useful.
That's why some queries turn up just one or two ads.
There could be more advertisers out there, but if our systems determine their ads aren't relevant to your search, you won't see them.
And for most searches, that means no ads.
Over the last four years, over 80% of searches on Google-- like ones for the weather, translations, or who's that guy from that thing-- didn't have any ads at the top of the results.
Search has always been about bringing you the most helpful information.
And when we do it right, you find exactly what you're looking for.
SEO Google instructions for TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, D&H, Bluestar, Cisco Meraki, Cisco, NASA SEWP V, REMC SAVE, CIO-CS, ITES-SW2, 2GIT, PEPPM, CMAS, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Ohio STS
How Your Location Makes Google Search More Helpful
Video Transcript:
At Google, we help connect people around the world with useful, relevant information.
And sometimes, the most helpful information depends on where you are.
Here's an example.
Let's say it's a weekend and you're in the mood for some pizza.
If we didn't take account of where you are when you search, our top results might only turn up the most popular pizza places in the world, which probably couldn't help with tonight's dinner.
But by using your location, Search can help you find all kinds of restaurants that serve and deliver pizza near you, including the local places that have those toppings that you really like.
And that's not all.
Using a location, Search can help find local services, like ATMs and grocery stores, and turn up results that don't have a physical location but are most helpful if location is taken into account-- like when to put the recycling out in your neighborhood.
But you may be wondering, how does it work? It's actually pretty simple.
When you search, we estimate your location in three key ways.
First, every device that's connected to the internet has something called an IP address, which is necessary to use the internet and also indicates basic location data, sort of like how the area code of a phone number can give the general idea of where a call is coming from.
When your device requests to connect to a web page, the site sees your IP address.
So when someone uses Search, Google sees their IP address, which indicates the general area, such as the region, city, or neighborhood that they're searching from.
This helps us better understand how to show locally relevant results.
Second, depending on your settings, we sometimes use your past activity on Google-- for example, places you've previously searched for.
And if you're signed in, we might also use your saved home and work address or location history if you've turned that on.
And finally, if you'd like the very best local results, enable your device's location permission to send this info to Google.
We can then use this precise location to get you the most helpful result.
Factoring in location when it matters helps our systems do an even better job of ranking hundreds of billions of web pages and places.
All this is taken into account by our systems in an instant, and content is ranked according to how relevant it is to your query and, when appropriate, where you are.
At Google, we're always looking for ways to connect all of our users with information they'll find helpful.
Location helps us do this, and it can make a big difference.
So you can find what you need just when you need it.
SEO Google instructions for TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, D&H, Bluestar, Cisco Meraki, Cisco, NASA SEWP V, REMC SAVE, CIO-CS, ITES-SW2, 2GIT, PEPPM, CMAS, Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Ohio STS
For a limited time, qualified resellers can try our SEO optimized eBusiness Experience for Free.
Try it for freeNo credit card required. No obligations. No risk.