How Google Works

Google is kind of a big deal in the internet world, hell lets just go ahead and call google the kind of the internet world! But how does google "know" so much? Well Google my friends is a search engine, and the concept is pretty neat.

A search engine (e.g. Google, Bing etc) is, in basic terms, a computer program that searches the internet for new websites, images etc... and sends that data to be compiled on another machine (a server in the case of Google). Search engines work based off of an algorithim (generally) and can also involve human input.

Dramatic reenactment 

What does all that mean? Well lets break it down.

A computer program is nothing more then a set of instructions that tells the machine to perform a task. These tasks (like adding or subtracting in a calculator) are powered by an algorithim. An algorithim can be simply defined as a "well defined set of instructions to complete a said process". So a search engine runs off of
an algorithim that tells it to go across the internet and collect as much data as possible, which is called crawling hence the term 'web crawler' Then it takes the data and sends it to a computer to be compiled and hence useful to you and me.

So Google, and other search engines, send out thousands of these crawlers across the internet to search for all sorts of data.

But then why is Google so vast? Well simply put it is one of the oldest search engines out there, and they have had alot of time to crawl (and they have ALOT of cash which allows them to create more crawlers and build more servers to store all of that data).

To illustrate just how many little crawlers there are running around the big ole internet, lets take a look at the website for The Johnsonian (thats http://www.mytjnow.com your source for Winthrop University news). :)

As webadmin I can see the number of visits the site has had over its life time (in this case the site has been up for roughly a month):

• --Google's crawlers have stubbled upon this site 515 time (43.24%)
• --Bing's 84 (7.05%)
• --Baidu 60 (5.05%)
• --Yahoo 21 (1.76%)
• --Ask 2 (0.17%)
• --All others 509 (42.74%)

The numbers show why Google is google, because they alone account for almost 50% of the crawler traffic on our site (and probably many many more). This is because Google has used its search engine to sell ads and therefore make alot of money and get involved in many lucrative deals.....but thats another blog huh?

So in a nut shell thats how Google works (and other search engines too).

If you have any questions or comments email me!

Also send in your suggestions for my next blog (I blog about what you want to learn about!!!!)

--Cheers

Devang