What Is Google Search And How Does It Work

Originally limited to movie and recipe websites in the United States only, the feature expanded to all countries globally in 2017. In May 2016, Google expanded on the “Rich snippets” format to offer “Rich cards”, which, similarly to snippets, display more information about results, but shows them at the top of the mobile website in a swipeable carousel-like format. Initially only available in English, the feature aims to simplify finding jobs suitable for each user. “Universal search” was launched by Google on May 16, 2007, as an idea that merged the results from different kinds of search types into one. Of search results, page titles and URLs, dates, and a preview text snippet for each result appears. The EU Court of Justice referred to Google’s treatment of rival shopping searches as “discriminatory” and in violation of the Digital Markets Act.

Dedicated encrypted search page

The new architecture provided no visual differences in the user interface, but added significant speed improvements and a new “under-the-hood” indexing infrastructure. In August 2009, Google invited web developers to test a new search architecture, codenamed “Caffeine”, and give their feedback. In December 2017, Google began rolling out the change, having already done so for multiple websites. In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy. Despite Google search’s immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its search tools.

Ranking of results

The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. The particular problem addressed in The New York Times article, which involved DecorMyEyes, was addressed shortly thereafter by an undisclosed fix in the Google algorithm. Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google’s spam checking algorithms.
Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. Google searches have also triggered keyword warrants and geofence warrants in which information is irwin casino shared with law enforcement, leading to a criminal case. The FTC was also continuing to investigate if Google’s favoring of their own services in their search results violated antitrust regulations. In 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Google US$22.5 million for violating their agreement not to violate the privacy of users of Apple’s Safari web browser. Google’s 40,000 searches per second translate to 8 kg CO2 per second or over 252 million kilos of CO2 per year. According to green search engine Ecosia, the industry standard for search engines is estimated to be about 0.2 grams of CO2 emission per search.
Besides the main text-based search-engine function of Google search, it also offers multiple quick, interactive features. A Google blog post about designing “India-first” products and features explains that it is “tailor-made for the millions of people in India and Indonesia coming online for the first time”. On December 15, 2016, Google rolled out a new desktop search interface that mimics their modular mobile user interface.

Complaints about indexing

Therefore, the update targeted particularly those YMYL pages that have low-quality content and misinformation. This is because misinformation can affect users financially, physically, or emotionally. Google announced completion of “Caffeine” on June 8, 2010, claiming 50% fresher results due to continuous updating of its index. The change was a response to the continued growth in mobile usage, and a push for web developers to adopt a mobile-friendly version of their websites.
The encrypted search was accessed at encrypted.google.com However, the web search is encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS) by default today, thus every search request should be automatically encrypted if TLS is supported by the web browser. “Instant previews” allowed previewing screenshots of search results’ web pages without having to open them. We will continue to work to improve our approach to removals in Autocomplete, and are listening carefully to feedback from our users.
Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, certain Flash multimedia content, and plain text files. Google said that the feature “helps people find information faster by showing a visual preview of each result.” The snapshots of web pages are stored on Google’s servers. Clicking on the magnifying glass beside the search-result links will show a screenshot of the web page and highlight the image’s relevant text. So, for example, if the results for a particular query seem pornographic, our algorithms may remove that query from Autocomplete, even if the query itself wouldn’t otherwise violate our policies. Our algorithms look not only at specific words, but compound queries based on those words, and across all languages. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that “Removing features is always tough, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Unfortunately, this feature never saw much pick up”.
Instant search was announced in September 2010 as a feature that displayed suggested results while the user typed in their search query, initially only in select countries or to registered users. Google Real-Time Search was a feature of Google Search in which search results also sometimes included real-time information from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and news websites. This feature originally allowed users to type in their search query, click the button and be taken directly to the first result, bypassing the search results page. Google applies query expansion to submitted search queries, using techniques to deliver results that it considers “smarter” than the query users actually submitted.
Tom Chavez of “Rapt”, a firm helping to determine a website’s advertising worth, estimated in 2007 that Google lost $110 million in revenue per year due to use of the button, which bypasses the advertisements found on the search results page. Unlike other search engines, when searching for exact phrases, Google Search only takes words that are on the same line into account. In September 2017, the Google Search app on iOS was updated to feature the same functionality. The Local Pack and Answer Box were two of the original features of the Google SERP that were primarily showcased in this manner, but this new layout creates a previously unseen level of design consistency for Google results. This phased rollout allowed Google to gather user feedback and refine the feature before a broader release. This feature uses Google’s advanced Gemini 2.0 model, which enhances the system’s reasoning capabilities and supports multimodal inputs, including text, images, and voice.

• Google searches have also triggered keyword warrants and geofence warrants in which information is shared with law enforcement, leading to a criminal case.
• There are also products available from Google that are not directly search-related.
• Google Discover, previously known as Google Feed, is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other news-related content.
• In 2013 the European Commission found that Google Search favored Google’s own products, instead of the best result for consumers’ needs.
• In August 2024, a US judge in Virginia ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search and search advertising.
• Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google’s spam checking algorithms.
• In March 2024, Google announced a significant update to its core search algorithm and spam targeting, which is expected to wipe out 40 percent of all spam results.

Until May 2013, Google Search had offered a feature to translate search queries into other languages. Then, the users searched “three White teenagers” and were presented with photos of smiling, happy teenagers. In 2016, some users Google searched “three Black teenagers” and images of criminal mugshots of young African American teenagers came up. Google search engine robots are programmed to use algorithms that understand and predict human behavior. In a November 2023 disclosure, during the ongoing antitrust trial against Google, an economics professor at the University of Chicago revealed that Google pays Apple 36% of all search advertising revenue generated when users access Google through the Safari browser. Pariser holds algorithms used in search engines such as Google Search responsible for catering “a personal ecosystem of information”.

Google

We help people discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources. New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search Check the facts with these Google features

• Prior to Universal search, a standard Google search would consist of links only to websites.
• A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that “Removing features is always tough, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Unfortunately, this feature never saw much pick up”.
• So, for example, if there’s a bad word in Russian, we may remove a compound word including the transliteration of the Russian word into English.
• The information is often used as a spoken answer in Google Assistant and Google Home searches.
• In April 2025, the trial to determine which remedies sought by the Department of Justice would be imposed to address Google’s illegal monopoly, which could include breaking up the company and preventing it from using its data to secure dominance in the AI sector.needs update
• When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance.

They also searched for “three Asian teenagers”, and very revealing photos of Asian girls and women appeared. Both Apple and Google have argued that disclosing the specific terms of their search default agreement would harm their competitive positions. A 2019 New York Times article on Google Search showed that images of child sexual abuse had been found on Google and that the company had been reluctant at times to remove them. In 2003, The New York Times complained about Google’s indexing, claiming that Google’s caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the use of search history requests to identify suspects in a 2020 arson, later stating that it is not a “broad proclamation” and noted that the warrant did not have an individualized probable cause. Some Google Doodles have interactivity beyond a simple search, such as the famous “Google Pac-Man” version that appeared on May 21, 2010.
When it was announced in May 2024, Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance was quoted as saying “This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content.” This feature leverages data from Google’s Knowledge Graph, a database that organizes and interconnects information about entities, enhancing the retrieval and presentation of relevant content to users. A Google Knowledge Panel is a feature integrated into Google search engine result pages, designed to present a structured overview of entities such as individuals, organizations, locations, or objects directly within the search interface. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine’s results with information gathered from a variety of sources. The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft’s recent release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing, as well as the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine based on “computational knowledge”. In October 2016, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, announced that the search engine would be making a separate, primary web index dedicated for mobile devices, with a secondary, less up-to-date index for desktop use.
In February 2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would favor mobile friendly over other websites. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. A feature similar to Real-Time Search was already available on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which showed results from Twitter and Facebook. On July 26, 2017, Google removed Instant results, due to a growing number of searches on mobile devices, where interaction with search, as well as screen sizes, differ significantly from a computer. In 2011, Google Search query results have been shown by Internet activist Eli Pariser to be tailored to users, effectively isolating users in what he defined as a filter bubble. In 2008, Google started to give users autocompleted search suggestions in a list below the search bar while typing, originally with the approximate result count previewed for each listed search suggestion.

It has also been criticized for condensing information from various sources, making it less likely for people to view full articles and websites. Scientific American has criticised the system on environmental grounds, as such a search uses 30 times more energy than a conventional one. Two weeks after the rollout of AI Overviews, Google made technical changes and scaled back the feature, pausing its use for some health-related queries and limiting its reliance on social media posts. At the 2023 Google I/O event in May, Google unveiled Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental feature in Google Search available through Google Labs which produces AI-generated summaries in response to search prompts. Another major update was released in September 2018, which renamed the app from Google Feed to Google Discover, updated the design, and adding more features.
The mobile apps exclusively feature Google Discover and a “Collections” feature, in which the user can save for later perusal any type of search result like images, bookmarks or map locations into groups. Cards include, “links to news stories, YouTube videos, sports scores, recipes, and other content based on what Google determined you’re most likely to be interested in at that particular moment.” Users can also tell Google they’re not interested in certain topics to avoid seeing future updates. In May 2017, Google enabled a new “Personal” tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts’ various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos. Universal search, however, incorporates a wide variety of sources, including websites, news, pictures, maps, blogs, videos, and more, all shown on the same search results page. In March 2024, Google announced a significant update to its core search algorithm and spam targeting, which is expected to wipe out 40 percent of all spam results.