Google 2

Searching and Ranking

When people search Google, they are asking the company to find every instance of the term in its index and rank the corresponding documents by their relevance.

1. The user types a search query; the typical query is two or three words, which can make finding the most relevant results challenging; roughly one in 10 queries is misspelled.


2. Before Google provides any information, it indentifies the searcher's location through his or her Internet Protocol(IP) address. The IP helps speed up the search by sending the request to the nearest data center and allows Google to indentify geographically appropriate ads.


3. The query is sent to central network, then redirected the nearest data center.
   
4. At the data center, the search term is run through the index; matching terms are sent back to the central network, then to the user with a summary of the Web page, called a "snippet"

THE "SECRET SAUCE"

Google determines which Web sites are most relevant to a search term by using its "secret sauce", formula that weighs more than 200 measurements, such as the number of times the search term appears on a Web page, the number of visitors to the page and the Page Rank- the number of sites linking to the page and the popurality of those sites.