It is fast and fairly efficient. Well, for the most part anyway.
But
have you ever wondered what takes place after you enter your search words into
your favorite search bar and hit enter? It is something that we all take for
granted today. You type in your query and in a couple of seconds, an over
whelming list of possibilities is displayed – on the magnitude of millions – “there are
33,800,000 results for your search”.
But how does it all work? What happens? What are the steps that take place? And where does it all happen? Google Works
Here,
then, is a guide to what happens during a typical Google search — now, of
course, with automatic spell-check.
Query
Box: It all starts with
somebody typing in a request for information about the safest dog food, what
time the D.M.V. closes, or what the prime rate is in China.
Domain-Name
Servers: The software for Google’s domain-name servers runs on
computers in leased or company-owned data centers all over the world, including
one sitting in a small town in Eastern Washington. Their sole purpose is
to shepherd searches into one of Google’s clusters as efficiently as possible,
taking into account which clusters are nearest to the searcher and which are
least busy at that instant.
The
Cluster:
The request continues into one of at least 200 clusters, which sit in
Google-owned data centers worldwide.
Google
Web Server:
This program splits a query among hundreds or thousands of machines so that
they can all work on it at the same time. It’s the difference between doing
your grocery shopping all by yourself and having 100 people simultaneously find
one item and toss it into your cart.
Index
Server:
Everything Google knows is stored in a massive database. But rather than
waiting for one computer to sift through those gigabytes of data, Google has
hundreds of computers scan its “card catalog” at the same time to find every
relevant entry. Popular searches are cached—held in memory—for a few hours
rather than run all over again. That means you, Britney.
Document
Server:
After the index server compiles its results, the document server pulls all the
relevant documents—the links and snippets of text from its massive database.
How does Google search the Web so quickly? It doesn’t. It keeps three copies of
all the information from the internet that it has indexed in its own document
servers, and all those data have already been prepped and sorted.
Spelling
Server:
Google doesn’t read words; it looks for patterns of characters, whether English,
German or Sanskrit. If it sees your requested pattern a thousand times but
finds a million hits for a similar pattern that’s off by one character, it
connects the dots and politely suggests what you probably meant, even while it
provides you the results, if any, for your fat-fingered query for “hwedge
funds.”
Ad
Server:
Each query is simultaneously run through an ad database, and matches are fed to
the Web server so that they’re placed on the results page. The ad team is in a
race with the search team. Google vows to deliver all searches as quickly as
possible; if ad results take longer to pull up than search results, they won’t
make it onto the page—and Google won’t make money on that search.
Page
Builder:
The Google Web server collects the results of the thousands of operations it
runs for a query, organizes all the data, and draws Google’s cunningly simple
results page on your browser window, all in less time than it took to read this
sentence.
Results
Displayed:
Often in 0.25 seconds or less.
So, the next time you hit your search box, remember
that while we may take it all for granted, it is a rather awe inspiring process
that takes place at a mind numbing speed. Not something to take for granted.
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