From User Query to Search Results - Break Down of the Step by Step Process
Have you ever wondered what is going on behind that friendly, plain, and useful Google Search page which we have all come to depend on and expect it to be there eagerly awaiting to help us find what we want, what we're looking for.
What is going on behind that search box during the split second in between the time that we submit a search query and then get the results page.
From Submit to Results - The Mechanics of a Search Query
- First the obvious. A user must go to google.com and enter a search query into the the search box.
- After the user hits submit then the query is picked up and stored in the web server.
- The google web server will then shoot that information over to the index servers. These servers are like a vast table of contents or book index for the entire known Internet. The index servers rush as fast as they can to find all pages that contain those keywords in the query.
- After the index servers have retrieved all the index information the index servers then shot that information over to the document servers. These servers contain all the cached pages that Google bot has found over the many years of crawling the web. the document servers takes links, snippets of information and orders them in relevancy.
- The document servers then as quickly as possible returns the resulting search information of that query as fast as it possibly can. It will even give a estimate of how many documents it found.That whole process takes only a fraction of a second. In fact for practical purposes it is instant.
