How Search works: Google Search basics

How does Google Search work? How many times have we asked ourselves this question, both from the point of view of the “normal” user and those who work in search marketing instead? So let’s try to analyze in a simple but in-depth way how the Search system works, focusing in particular on all the indications regarding how Google discovers web pages, crawls them and publishes them, but also on what all this means for sites and for SEO.

What is Google Search

Search engines are the digital version of a librarian and help users get the appropriate answers and information for their query and need by scanning the full index of results they have available.

Thus, search engines are answer machines, searchable databases of Web content, and exist to discover, understand, and organize Web content to deliver the most relevant results to the questions posed by users.

Broadly speaking, search engines are composed of two main parts: a search index (representing the digital library of information about Web pages) and search algorithms, i.e., computer programs charged with comparing search index results to identify the most appropriate ones based on the rules provided.

Google Search or Google Search is exactly that: a fully automated search engine that uses software, called web crawlers, to regularly explore the Web and find pages to add to its Index. As reiterated frequently, the mission of Google and its search system is “to organize information from around the world and make it globally accessible and useful,” and this requires continual work to continually map the Web and other sources to enable each user to access the information that the algorithms deem most relevant and useful, using as a compass the criteria we usually refer to as 200 ranking factors on Google. The results are then presented in various ways in SERPs, based on what is most appropriate for the type of information that specific person is looking for.

Google’s statistics and numbers

Google made its official debut in 1997 and has rather quickly established itself as “the” search engine on the Web: it is currently the most visited site in the world (for several years) and is so popular that its name (or a derivative) has become synonymous with online search itself in several languages, as evidenced by the English verb to google, the German googeln and the Italian googlare.

Numbers help us understand the dominance of this behemoth in the search engine market: as of February 2023, Statcounter certifies that Google holds about 94 percent of the entire worldwide reference marketshare, relegating the main competitors to residual shares (the second ranked engine is Bing, which does not reach 3 percent of users).

Speaking of figures and statistics, then, impressive are the data revealing the amount of work the search engine does every moment – which also ties in more or less directly with the extent of its Index. Specifically, Internet Live Stats counts that Google in 2023 processes nearly 100 thousand searches every single second, and thus over 8.5 billion searches per day and over 3.1 trillion on an annual basis.

According to Siteefy, as of September 4, 2021, Google contained about 25 billion web pages in its index, while World Wide Web Size Project estimates the estimated number of web pages indexed in Google to be about 50 billion, and on an absolute level there would be about 1.13 trillion websites in the world (even though 82% of them results inactive!).

Thus, every time we enter a query in the search box, Google starts analyzing “thousands, sometimes millions, of web pages