Whether you look for something routine like a weather forecast or perform business tasks like checking your position on SERP, you always start with a search engine, Google, in most cases. However, you must know how it functions to get the most accurate search results, develop an effective SEO strategy, and more. This article examines how Google works and discusses insights from the Google API Content Warehouse leak.

Why Google

Google is a search engine software that helps people find information on the World Wide Web. However, why do we need it, and why is Google so popular?

Simply put, the Internet is an extensive network of devices, such as computers and servers. Every text file, video, image, etc., is stored on those devices. Without search engines, you’d have to know the exact URL address of every single webpage to access it. It even sounds impossible. Search engines create a catalog of what’s on the Web and serve the necessary pages per your query. Thanks to such software, you don’t have to memorize URLs of webpages, and it takes you as long as fractions of a second to find data. 

As the amount of data grows drastically, it’s important for search engines to keep up with users’ evolving needs. Google constantly improves its algorithms to serve relevant search results, adds new features, and offers an effective monetization model, which allows it to secure first place among search engines. This makes it the most globally used one, with a 91.05% market share as of June 2024. 

There are other well-known search engines besides Google, such as Yahoo and Bing. Also, more “local” search engines like Baidu exist. Such engines are usually tailored specifically for a particular market. They are adapted to a local language, platforms, and online services, making them convenient. The important pitfall of such engines is that they operate within government regulations and a country’s censorship. It may severely limit users while looking for particular information online. 

This article concentrates primarily on Google; however, other search engines generally follow the same operating algorithm.

So, how does Google work? 

First, you must remember that World Wide Web searches don’t happen in real-time mode. In other words, when you type a query into a search bar, Google doesn’t search information across the Web; instead, it serves you pages it has already put in its database. 

At the same time, Google works every single second to fill and update its database. 

Everything starts with so-called seed URLs. They are a set of trusted, relevant, and authoritative sources. Because they serve as starting points for Google bots, they are sometimes generated and curated manually to ensure their reliability. Google bots visit those URLs and download the full HTML code of the pages. This code provides important data like page content, links, and metadata. 

Google then identifies keywords using data obtained from HTML code. Words and phrases in heading tags and meta keywords provide information about the page’s topic. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, Google analyzes the text content of a webpage to identify individual words, phrases, and their relationships and figure out their semantic meaning. Then, the search engine analyzes anchor text (the text of hyperlinks) and how often words and phrases are used. All of it helps assume what words are keywords. Then, Google takes it further by scrutinizing their position, surrounding context, and relevance to the topic. Keywords used in titles or with other keywords are considered more relevant, so Google ranks them higher. 

Finally, Google saves keywords and other data obtained from HTML code in its vast database called Google Index. 

Besides keywords, Google bots pay attention to links they discover while crawling seed URLs. 

When a bot finds a link to a page that isn’t yet indexed, it puts the page on a queue to scrape and index it as well. 

Google bots also regularly revisit previously indexed pages to renew data. If Google considers a page important, the search engine revisits it more often. The main factors contributing to a page’s importance are page authority, freshness, user engagement level, and others. 

What happens to new pages that aren’t yet mentioned anywhere? 

There are several ways Google reaches them: 

– Focused crawling 

Google bots permanently explore the Internet, looking for new URL patterns, IP addresses, and domain registration. They may indicate the existence of new web pages. 

– Social media and forums

Members of online communities often mention, discuss, and share websites. This makes it possible to identify new sources that have yet to be indexed. 

– Analyzing data 

Reported broken links, suggestions for new content, user engagement metrics, data patterns—all of it may help you identify evolving websites that don’t have a solid backlink profile yet. Machine learning and AI-powered techniques are often used to analyze such large amounts of data. 

– Special tools 

Webmasters themselves can notify the search engine about new web pages. Bots add those websites to a queue, and they are then indexed. 

However, more than having a huge database is needed to satisfy users’ needs. Google has to understand what you want in order to serve you relevant search results. First, the same word may have dozens of meanings. Second, we use jargon and different dialects; we make mistakes while typing words, which makes it harder to guess what we need. Third, people often search for information on topics they aren’t familiar with, so they don’t know what they are looking for. So, Google constantly learns and analyzes queries to better understand our search intents. 

Furthermore, it relies on different metrics, such as our location, search history, fingerprints, preferences, and more, to provide not generic but personalized search results. For example, if you are a Linking Park fan and often listen to their music, Google would know that. So when you type “crawling” in a search bar, the search engine offers links to webpages with lyrics, cover videos on YouTube, and more instead of providing a definition of what crawling means in the context of technologies. 

Speaking about what you see on a search engine results page (SERP), how does Google decide what links to serve first and what to put at the end of a page? Until March 2024, Google’s ranking algorithms were closely guarded, so we could only guess which factors Google considered while giving ranks. However, between March and May 2024, an internal Google document, Google API Content Warehouse, leaked and was publicly available on GitHub. Those 2569 pages provide numerous valuable insights about how Google ranks pages and what SEO techniques are effective or not. For example, once-popular Link Juice and PageRank sculpting techniques are no longer used. At the same time, some public statements made by Google’s SEOs don’t match what is written in the document. For instance, Gary Ilyes stated that Google doesn’t consider clicks while ranking pages; however, the document tells us otherwise. A “hostAge” attribute proves that Google sandboxes new websites, while Google denied this before. The document also testifies that Chrome data is widely used when ranking pages. Again, against Google’s denials. 

There are some more essential details. For example, whether a website has both desktop and mobile versions, offers localized versions, or is a website of a well-established brand with a strong social media presence—all those factors influence rankings. Visual content also becomes more important. It should be of high quality and highlight a page’s key topics and aspects, especially for verticals like step-by-step manuals. 

The document also confirms that Google uses machine learning techniques and aims to improve its dealings with unstructured content such as social media posts. The share of unstructured content grows constantly; however, traditional keyword search, described above, isn’t really effective here. There is another concept of a search called a full-text search. Full-text search means that not only keywords and metadata are indexed but also full text. It makes it possible to search unstructured content like large documents and find relevant results even if keywords don’t match. As of today, you can use full-text search in Google to some degree, for example, with the help of quotes for a phrase search, the “site:” operator for search within a specific domain, and Boolean operators like “or” and “and.” However, if it is not enough, consider using dedicated full-text search engines like Algolia or Elasticsearch. 

Conclusion

Knowing how Google works may provide you with valuable ideas about how to find what you’re looking for faster, how to make your website rank high on SERPs, etc. At the same time, there are a lot of additional legal tools that may help you get along well with search engines. Proxies are helpful if you need to get over personalization, check SERPs for other locations, and more. DataImpulse provides you with legally obtained, whitelisted proxies at a modest price. Click on the “Try now” button in the top right corner of the screen to start with us, or use the widget in the bottom right corner of the screen if you need help from our support agents.