We are all very familiar with the world’s most popular search engine, which helps millions of people find information on the Internet every day. If you need to find an answer to a question, directions, or the latest news, you’re likely to use Google to do so.

How does Google work?

Google can be compared to an extremely fast and well-organized librarian who knows where every book, article, or video on the Internet is stored. Here’s how it works:

The search engine uses special robot programs called “spiders” that “crawl” the Internet and “read” pages. They look at the words, images, and other content on each page and record it in a huge database.

When you type a query into Google’s search bar, it quickly scans its index to find all relevant information. But Google doesn’t just show these pages in random order. It uses sophisticated algorithms to determine which pages best match your query based on hundreds of factors, such as content quality, source reliability, and even how other users have interacted with the page.

As a result, Google shows the results it considers the best for your query. These results can be web pages, images, videos, news, a map, or even direct answers to questions like the definition of a word or the weather in your city.

What makes Google so special?

Speed: It can crawl billions of pages in its index and provide you with results in just a few seconds.

Accuracy: Thanks to its sophisticated algorithms and continuous improvement, Google can often find exactly the information you need.

Relevance: Google constantly updates its index, adding new pages and updating information on old ones, so you always have access to the most up-to-date data.

How to use Google effectively?

• Choose your keywords carefully. The more precise the words, the better the results.
• If you want to exclude certain information from the results, use the minus sign. For example, if you’re looking for books about kittens but don’t want to see them for sale, write “books about kittens – sale”.
• If you are looking for a precise phrase, use quotation marks. For example, “best borscht recipe” will show pages with these words in that order.

History

The history of the Google search engine began in January 1996, when two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to develop a new type of search engine for the Internet. The name “Google” was chosen as a play on words, referring to the term “google” – a number consisting of one followed by one hundred zeros, symbolizing the scale of information that the search engine intended to process.

The idea of the project was to create a system that would not just index words on a page, but analyze the relationships between sites, determining their relevance and usefulness. Larry and Sergey developed an algorithm called PageRank, which measured the “weight” of pages based on the number and quality of links leading to them from other resources. This method has significantly increased the efficiency of search queries by offering users the most relevant pages for their queries.

The first prototype of the system, called BackRub, was launched in 1996 and operated on the servers of Stanford University. However, due to the growing traffic and high demands on the university’s server resources, the project was renamed Google, and the google.com domain was registered in September 1997.

The search engine was officially launched in September 1998. Since then, Google has rapidly grown from a small university project to one of the largest technology companies in the world. Today, Google is not just a search engine, but an entire ecosystem of Internet services, including email, mapping services, cloud servers, a mobile operating system, and even its own line of smartphones.

Some interesting facts about the Google search engine that few people know:

• Google’s first data center was built from toy blocks. Larry and Sergiy used interconnected Lego blocks to create an enclosure with ten 4GB hard drives. It was a cost-effective basis for their first data center.
• Google indexes more than 100 million gigabytes (100 petabytes) of data. For example, this is equivalent to about 200 thousand years of continuous music playback.
• Google’s first Twitter message was sent in February 2009 and sounded like “I’m feeling lucky” in binary code.
• Google Doodles are changes to the Google logo on the home page designed to celebrate memorable events and anniversaries. The first Doodle was created in 1998 to celebrate the Burning Man festival that the company’s founders attended.
• The phrase “Don’t be evil” has been Google’s unofficial motto since their founding. It reflects a commitment to making the world a better place through technology.
• Google’s first office was an ordinary garage that was rented from Susan Wojcicki, one of the first employees and later CEO of YouTube. Susan herself later became one of the most influential women in the tech world.
• Google is acquiring companies very quickly – about one company a week. Among the biggest acquisitions were the well-known YouTube in 2006 and Android in 2005.
• The search engine is known for its jokes and easter eggs. For example, if you enter “do a barrel roll” in the search bar, the entire page will do a barrel roll, and “askew” will shift the page image slightly.

Google has forever changed the way we search for and find information, making the entire world’s Internet available just a click away. With its help, we can find almost everything, and this undoubtedly makes it an indispensable tool in our daily lives.