How Does Google Work?
Instead of counting paper ballots to determine the most popular classmate, the software behind Google’s search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations based on a prompt, which are performed in only a fraction of a second. These calculations rotates around a single ranking algorithm that takes into account 200 signals, and is, in the in the words of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam, “a big, hairy beast”. Google uses something called PageRank as the backbone of the calculation. Page Rank measures how important a page is based on the incoming links from other pages. However, what makes Google’s approach more sophisticated is that it combines determining the overall importance of a search and its query-specific relevance in order to put the most relevant and reliable results first. While in the past search engines relied very heavily on how often a word appeared on a web page in order to produce a result, Google now uses its “beast” to analyze those 200 signals to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important to your particular .
