What Is Google Search And How Does It Work

Because Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters attempt to influence their website’s Google rankings. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of other pages linking to them. The PageRank algorithm instead analyzes human-generated links assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are also important. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance. Google’s rise was largely due to a patented algorithm called PageRank which helps rank web pages that match a given search irwin casino string. Businesses who fail to update their websites accordingly could see a dip in their regular websites traffic.

“Hummingbird” search algorithm upgrade

Because of this, we take an algorithmic approach to removals, and just like our search algorithms, these are imperfect. There are several reasons you may not be seeing search queries for a particular topic. This has led to lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and the use of euphemisms, such as calling Google Search a famous web search engine. Google has said it will appeal the ruling, though they did propose to loosen search deals with Apple and others requiring them to set Google as the default search engine. This revelation has raised concerns about the dominance of Google in the search engine market and the potential anticompetitive effects of its agreements with Apple. The revenue generated from Safari users has been kept confidential, but the 36% figure suggests that it is likely in the tens of billions of dollars.

Big data and human bias

In April 2025, the trial to determine which remedies sought by the Department of Justice would be imposed to address Google’s illegal monopoly, which could include breaking up the company and preventing it from using its data to secure dominance in the AI sector.needs update In August 2024, a US judge in Virginia ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search and search advertising. Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google can be openly inquired via Google Trends and have been shown to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels, and provide the information faster than traditional reporting methods and surveys.

Search syntax

The new architecture provided no visual differences in the user interface, but added significant speed improvements and a new “under-the-hood” indexing infrastructure. In August 2009, Google invited web developers to test a new search architecture, codenamed “Caffeine”, and give their feedback. In December 2017, Google began rolling out the change, having already done so for multiple websites. In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy. Despite Google search’s immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its search tools.

Knowledge Graph

  • Google announced completion of “Caffeine” on June 8, 2010, claiming 50% fresher results due to continuous updating of its index.
  • Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it aims to organize your browsing time.
  • Both Apple and Google have argued that disclosing the specific terms of their search default agreement would harm their competitive positions.
  • The service evolved from Google Video, Google’s discontinued video hosting service that also allowed to search the web for video clips.
  • Google’s rise was largely due to a patented algorithm called PageRank which helps rank web pages that match a given search string.

It has also been criticized for condensing information from various sources, making it less likely for people to view full articles and websites. Scientific American has criticised the system on environmental grounds, as such a search uses 30 times more energy than a conventional one. Two weeks after the rollout of AI Overviews, Google made technical changes and scaled back the feature, pausing its use for some health-related queries and limiting its reliance on social media posts. At the 2023 Google I/O event in May, Google unveiled Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental feature in Google Search available through Google Labs which produces AI-generated summaries in response to search prompts. Another major update was released in September 2018, which renamed the app from Google Feed to Google Discover, updated the design, and adding more features.
Google Discover, previously known as Google Feed, is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other news-related content. The primary objective of the Google Knowledge Panel is to provide users with immediate, factual answers, reducing the need for extensive navigation across multiple web pages. The content within a Knowledge Panel is derived from various sources, including Wikipedia and other structured databases, ensuring that the information displayed is both accurate and contextually relevant. The information is often used as a spoken answer in Google Assistant and Google Home searches. The information covered by the Knowledge Graph grew significantly after launch, tripling its original size within seven months, and being able to answer “roughly one-third” of the 100 billion monthly searches Google processed in May 2016. Knowledge Graph boxes were added to Google’s search engine in May 2012, starting in the United States, with international expansion by the end of the year.
Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, certain Flash multimedia content, and plain text files. Google said that the feature “helps people find information faster by showing a visual preview of each result.” The snapshots of web pages are stored on Google’s servers. Clicking on the magnifying glass beside the search-result links will show a screenshot of the web page and highlight the image’s relevant text. So, for example, if the results for a particular query seem pornographic, our algorithms may remove that query from Autocomplete, even if the query itself wouldn’t otherwise violate our policies. Our algorithms look not only at specific words, but compound queries based on those words, and across all languages. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that “Removing features is always tough, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Unfortunately, this feature never saw much pick up”.

  • The feature faced public criticism in the first weeks of its rollout after errors from the tool went viral online.
  • A 2019 New York Times article on Google Search showed that images of child sexual abuse had been found on Google and that the company had been reluctant at times to remove them.
  • It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just a website’s homepage.
  • The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft’s recent release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing, as well as the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine based on “computational knowledge”.
  • Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Shopping, Google Maps, Google Custom Search, Google Earth, Google Docs, Picasa (discontinued), Panoramio (discontinued), YouTube, Google Translate, Google Blog Search, and Google Desktop Search (discontinued).
  • As of 2019, Google will not allow political campaigns worldwide to target their advertisement to people to make them vote.
  • Google has said it will appeal the ruling, though they did propose to loosen search deals with Apple and others requiring them to set Google as the default search engine.

More by Google LLC

They also searched for “three Asian teenagers”, and very revealing photos of Asian girls and women appeared. Both Apple and Google have argued that disclosing the specific terms of their search default agreement would harm their competitive positions. A 2019 New York Times article on Google Search showed that images of child sexual abuse had been found on Google and that the company had been reluctant at times to remove them. In 2003, The New York Times complained about Google’s indexing, claiming that Google’s caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the use of search history requests to identify suspects in a 2020 arson, later stating that it is not a “broad proclamation” and noted that the warrant did not have an individualized probable cause. Some Google Doodles have interactivity beyond a simple search, such as the famous “Google Pac-Man” version that appeared on May 21, 2010.
On September 10, 2024, the European-based EU Court of Justice found that Google held an illegal monopoly with the way the company showed favoritism to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying €2.4 billion. In 2023, drawing on internal Google documents disclosed as part of the United States v. Google LLC (2020) antitrust case, technology reporters claimed that Google Search was “bloated and overmonetized” and that the “semantic matching” of search queries put advertising profits before quality. Google Search Console helps to check for websites that use duplicate or copyright content. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings to draw more searchers to their clients’ sites.
The court found that Google maintained its market dominance by paying large amounts to phone-makers and browser-developers to make Google its default search engine. The search engine would also be set up in the garage of Susan Wojcicki’s Menlo Park home. We show different kinds of content to help you find what you’re looking for – from maps to movie times. Google originally suggested that the interruption was temporary and related to the launch of Google+; they subsequently announced that it was due to the expiry of a commercial arrangement with Twitter to provide access to tweets. The feature was introduced on December 7, 2009, and went offline on July 2, 2011, after the deal with Twitter expired. The feature was introduced in November 2010 to the desktop website and removed in April 2013, citing low usage.
It automatically corrects apparent misspellings by default (while offering to use the original spelling as a selectable alternative), and provides the same results regardless of capitalization. The largest of those, the google.com site, is the top most-visited website in the world. On October 28, 2024, AI Overviews was rolled out to 100 more countries, including Australia and New Zealand. The feature faced public criticism in the first weeks of its rollout after errors from the tool went viral online. As of 2019, Google will not allow political campaigns worldwide to target their advertisement to people to make them vote.
In February 2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would favor mobile friendly over other websites. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. A feature similar to Real-Time Search was already available on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which showed results from Twitter and Facebook. On July 26, 2017, Google removed Instant results, due to a growing number of searches on mobile devices, where interaction with search, as well as screen sizes, differ significantly from a computer. In 2011, Google Search query results have been shown by Internet activist Eli Pariser to be tailored to users, effectively isolating users in what he defined as a filter bubble. In 2008, Google started to give users autocompleted search suggestions in a list below the search bar while typing, originally with the approximate result count previewed for each listed search suggestion.

The encrypted search was accessed at encrypted.google.com However, the web search is encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS) by default today, thus every search request should be automatically encrypted if TLS is supported by the web browser. “Instant previews” allowed previewing screenshots of search results’ web pages without having to open them. We will continue to work to improve our approach to removals in Autocomplete, and are listening carefully to feedback from our users.
For approximately 40 minutes on January 31, 2009, all search results were mistakenly classified as malware and could therefore not be clicked; instead a warning message was displayed and the user was required to enter the requested URL manually. Investigators can request Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword or query or every phone in a particular place at a certain time. Clicking on the Doodle links to a string of Google search results about the topic. Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it aims to organize your browsing time. In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Google also provides services for searching images (Google Images), Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos (Google Videos), searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online.