Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. How Google Search Works

In This Chapter

• Understanding how Google arrives at its results and how it ranks them

• Defining Google's pros and cons

• Exploring how your own Google search results affect you

Even if you're not looking to become an expert, you should understand how Google search works. That way, you know what to expect from it — and perhaps how to get it to award your site a higher ranking on key search terms.

A search engine really does just three things: looks through, or crawls, the Web to build an index of pages; ranks pages on various search terms; and returns search results to users.

Note

Google keeps some details of its inner workings secret for two reasons: to protect its competitive position, and to keep search engine optimization (SEO) experts from developing tricks that get their pages higher rankings than they really deserve. Google is also constantly changing its techniques for the same reasons. So the descriptions here are likely to be generally correct, but no one can tell you what's happening specifically.

Crawling the Web

Search engines are described using terms that play off the name World Wide Web. A search engine starts by unleashing a spider — a computer program that follows links from one Web page to the next, crawling the Web to find pages on which someone might want to search. (Crawling the Web, in this way, makes more sense than surfing it does! Crawling is slower and more careful.)

As the search engine's spider crawls the Web, it examines each page ...