To understand what happens when we Google something, we need to dig deeper and follow the process from the other end.

Google bots are constantly crawling the web. This software programmes - called Spiders - start with fetching a few web pages, then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to, and follow all the links on those pages and fetch the pages they link to, and so on, until they’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web. Once the page is crawled, it is indexed within the seconds.

Now Google’s algorithm estimates the domain and page’s overall authority. It is not surprising that Google doesn’t reveal too much and is very secretive about it - its algorithm is in fact what makes it so great.

The software behind Google’s search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses more than 200 signals - they not only ask questions like “how many times does this page contain the key word?”, “do the words appear in the title?”, “in a url?”, “directly adjacent?”, “does the page include synonyms for those words”, “is this page from a quality website or is it low quality”, “what is this page page rank?”, but also examine the entire link structure of the web with their PageRank algorithm. They also conduct a hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted.

This way Google creates a constantly updated cache of active web - so when we do a google search we aren’t actually searching the web - we’re searching google’s index of the web.

Finally, all these factors are combined together to produce each page’s overall score and send back your search results. By combing overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google put the most relevant and reliable results first.

Each entry includes a title, a url and a snippet of text to help me decide are whether this page is what I’m looking for. I also see links to similar pages, Google’s most recent stored version of that page, and related searches that I might want to try next.

It’s mind boggling when you realise all this happens in a split of a second.