Google Search, how info are organized and displayed
Google continues its transparency operations, with which it tries to inform (summarily) users and experts about the operation of its search engine: with the latest contribution, we can find out how is organized the famous Search Index, where the information comes from and how the algorithm manages to make SERPs useful, responding to requests from people and respecting the criteria and priorities set by Google.
The Google Index and info for users
The biggest challenge of Google today is not only indexing everything that is available on the Web, but also (and most importantly) presenting the results in a useful and quickly accessible way to users, organizing the information it shows in SERP in an easy to understand and “digest” for people.
For this reason, Nick Fox (Vice President of Product & Design, Search and Assistant of the American company) has tried to offer “a closer look at how we approach the organization of information on Google Search”with two different articles published on the official Google website.
When you come to Google and launch a search, Fox says, “there could be billions of pages that are potential matches for your query and millions of new pages are produced every minute”. At first, Google updated its search index once a month but now “like other search engines, we constantly index new information to make it accessible via search”.
The complexity of the work of the search engine
A further element of complexity comes from Google’s ambitions that, since its foundation more than 22 years ago, has continued “to pursue the mission of organizing worldwide information and making it universally accessible and useful”. A broader objective than the simple organization of web pages, which rather concerns the organization of “all the information in the world”, as Fox says.
In a short time, the VP continues, “Google expanded beyond the Web and began looking for new ways to understand the world and make information and knowledge accessible to more people. The Internet and the world have changed a lot since those early days and we continued to improve Google Search to anticipate and respond to the evolving information needs of people”.
It is no mystery that “the results of the research you saw in 1998 are different from those you might find today”, and it therefore requires a disclosure effort by the company to give some quick details on “how we approach the organization of an ever-expanding universe of web pages, images, videos, insights into the real world and all the other forms of information that there may be”.
Google’s ambitions
Today, in fact, Google “indexes all types of information, from text and images in web pages to real-world information, like if a local store has in stock a sweater you are looking for”.
To make