How Google Views and Rates a Site

chillibreeze writer — Jeena

The World Wide Web is an information galaxy that is expanding virtually. With new information, pages and sites added each day how do we pick out information that is relevant to the issue we have at hand. The answer is obviously with the help of search engines. In today’s day world search has become synonymous with the term Googling”. How did Googling come into effect and what actually happens when we hit search? Let’s have a look at how Google, the most popular search engine, functions.

Google was the brainchild of two Stanford University graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They wanted to device a better search engine that allowed them easier and improved viability over the then existing search engines i.e., Excite and Alta Vista.

The factors that set Google apart from the other search engines possibly is that it does a better job at determining if a link is a true editorial citation. Google has an aggressive duplicate content filter that filters out similar content. It also tries to focus on the actual query or its intent than doing a mundane text matching process, the advantage of this process is that very relevant information is returned on its searches and any unwanted content is filtered out. So how exactly does Google go about this process?

At the heart of the Google function is a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers that carries out fast parallel processing, hence reducing the data processing time significantly. Google search function has three basic components, i.e. Googlebot, the Indexer and the Query processor.

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler. It comprises of a number of computers and functions like a web browser that sends out requests to web servers for web pages and downloads the entire page. These pages are forwarded to the Google’s indexer. When a page is downloaded, the links that appear on it are collected and queued up to be crawled. This helps in achieving broader subject coverage, this method is called “deep crawling”. Google recrawls pages based on the frequency the pages change so that the Index is kept updated. This type of crawl is called “fresh crawl”. Pages such as newspaper and stock prices pages are updated daily.

The pages downloaded by Googlebot are stored on the Index database. The index is sorted alphabetically according to the search term. Each search term would list out a set of pages which contains information relating to that particular term. To improve the search performance, certain words called “stop words” i.e. words such as the, is, of etc. are not included in the indexing process.

The Query processor is an important part of the search engine. It has several components such as the user interface, the evaluation engine and the results formatter. When a query comes in, the Google web server forwards it to the index servers, the index server points out the page where the query term is available. It is then forwarded to the doc servers which do the actual retrieving of the stored document and the results are returned to the user. Google uses a patented tool called PageRank to rate the websites. A number of factors are considered when deciding the rank of a page; a PageRank is based in the number of pages and importance of those pages that is linked to the original site. A higher page rank points to the document’s relevance for the query.

Machine learning techniques such as “spelling correcting system”, to figure out alternative spellings, are used to improve the performance of the search engine.

Reference:
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in August, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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Jeena writes for chillibreeze.

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