How do GOOGLE work the way it does?

This being my first post in A2E( Anything2Everything) blog. I thought it would be perfect to start with something which literally provides us information on Anything2Everything!

So, this was exactly what I googled to get ideas to write this post.

 It is one of the random questions that come to my mind but gets fragmented into other thoughts in no time and I completely forget about it. As Google turned 21 years this 27 Sep 2019, I thought it was only fair to gain some basic understanding of what happens behind the screen?

(Spoiler Alert- So before I begin if you are here for some cheatsheet with all the intricate details I would suggest not to read any further.)

Well, in this post I will be trying to provide a simple approach citing examples to make one understand. How Google works the way it does?

Before getting into how google works can we go into thinking of how people used to work when there were no computers when there was no easily available internet to get all the related information in some clicks. 

For example, if you were looking for which new movies to watch. What would you have done? 

Refer few magazines and then newspapers> read the reviews > then grade/compare and rank them in an order you would like to watch? Right? Exactly this is the way GOOGLE works too!

Once when you type in your query and run the search Google’s first job is to 'crawl' the web with ‘Spiders’. These are little automated programs or bots that scour the net for any new or old information available regarding your query

Next what it does is collect all that information and maintain them in numerous pages and rank them according to the number of links it received and how valuable the data is in them.

The more the links and citations or social signs alert Google that the page has better content thus the page gets better ranking, gets exposed to more people, thus following an upward trend.

This is called ‘PageRank’ something that the co-founders of Google, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, wanted to apply the ‘grading’ system to the web’s information. They used backlinks as a proxy for votes.

Well, from past few years google is working on

‘RankBrain’, this is the latest technology which is being used it works using AI(Artificial Intelligence), in simpler words the more queries, searches are performed the better and accurate Google turns to provide us information.

Let us consider some turn of events which will help us understand this technology better

1. You are a fitness enthusiast and vegan
2. You maintain an online blog wherein you post various exercises, diet charts.
3. Last week you ordered your groceries, dairy-free products online.
4. And today you just Googled ‘Lunch’ and you find in your results, the nearby vegan restaurants, best healthy recipes for lunch, protein-packed lunch available for ordering.

See? You get a tailor-made result according to your liking and needs. This is how AI works it stores all the bits available at random times and fit them like a puzzle even when, one does not explicitly mention.

As easy as it might appear Google's search engine works on very complex algorithms and perform some mind-boggling operations to get the desired results for the user within few seconds before one gets restless :p

Let me know how you felt about this post on how Google works in layman terms!