Google Releases Interactive Infographic: “How Search Works”

I am sure many of you have wondered how Google search works, how it finds pages from across the web and decides how to list them in response to a search? Well, if that’s the case, then Google’s got a new resource designed to answer questions. Called “How Search Works,” the new area announced today is an interactive infographic that explains more about the search process, including how Google deal with spam issues.

The new area was inspired by Google’s The Story Of Send, an interactive infographic that Google released last year to explain how it handles email.

“We were looking at this site [The Story Of Send], Matt Cutts [Google’s chief web spam fighter] and I and others on the [search] team and thinking, ‘Why isn’t there anything like this about search in a similar format?’,” said Jake Hubert, a product manager who works with Google Search.

The infographic has three parts:

Crawling & Indexing

The area has three parts, beginning with how Google finds web pages (by “crawling”) and stores them to make them searchable.

AS you explore the area, you’ll find places where you can hover the mouse and click for more information.

Ranking Pages With The Algorithm

The second part deals with how Google returns matches in response to a search, how it decides which pages from the index should be ranked tops.

As with the first part, you can explore different areas of how the algorithm works to learn more:

Spam Fighting

The last part of the infographic deals with how Google fights spam:

It’s a nice and simple way to lean how Google Search works.