How Search Works Video by Matt Cutts of Google

Search engines can be viewed as the card catalog of the Internet, the largest information resource in the world. The Internet is composed of 100s of billions of web pages and billions of diverse users, each user with very specific needs. Understanding how search works helps businesses get more visitors to their website through effective search engine marketing. Here is a video of how search works where Matt Cutts covers some of the basics.

How Search Works Video

Search engines play a prominent role in the contemporary Internet user experience. Businesses with websites looking to grow sales should take note. Search engines like Google drive a majority visitors to business websites while connecting users with the relevant content they are searching for online. Savvy businesses understand this and use search engine marketing to gain a competitive advantage. Search engines are critical to connecting with clients and customers searching online for information on products and services they wish to purchase.

The following How Search Works video featuring Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team Lead, provides an excellent overview how the Google search engine works in relatively non-technical terms. Matt specializes in search engine optimization issues and is well known in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam which impacts the relevancy of Google search results, resulting in a less positive user experience.

Matt Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google. Matt Cutts is to SEO as Ben Bernake is to Wall Street.

Video Transcript – How search works, by Matt Cutts

Hi my name is Matt Cutts I’m an engineer in the Quality Group at Google and I’d like to talk today about what happens when you do a web search.

The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search you aren’t actually searching the web. Your searching Google’s index of the web or at least as much of it as we can find.

We do this with software programs called spiders. Spiders start by fetching a few webpages and then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to and then follow all the links on those pages and fetch the pages they link to and so on until we’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web. Many billions of pages stored across thousands of machines.

Now suppose I want to know how fast the cheetah can run. I type in my search, say “cheetah running speed” and hit return. Our software searches our index to find every page that includes those search terms. In this case there are hundreds of thousands of possible results.

How does Google decide which few documents I really want? By asking questions. More than 200 of them like how many times does this page contain your keywords? Do the words appear in the title? In the URL? Directly adjacent? Does the page include synonyms for those words? Is this page from a quality website or is it low quality or even spammy? What is the pages Page Rank. That is a formula invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside links point to it and how important those links are.

Finally, we combine all those factors together to produce each pages overall score and send you back your search results about half a second after you submit your search.

At Google we take our commitment to delivering useful and impartial search results very seriously. We don’t ever accept payment add a site to our index, update it more often or improve its ranking. Let’s take a look at my search results:

Each entry includes a title, a URL, and a snippet of text to help me decide if page has what I am looking for. I also see links to similar pages, Google’s most recent stored version of that page, and related searches that I might want try next.

And sometimes, along the right and at the top of the search results are ads. We take our advertising business very seriously as well. Both our commitment to deliver the best possible audience for advertisers, and to strive to show only ads that you want to see. We are very careful to distinguish your ads from your regular search results. And we won’t show any ads at all if we think they won’t help you find the information that you’re looking for., which in this case, the cheetah’s top running speed is more than 60 mph.

Thanks for watching this How Search Works Video and I hope this made Google and search engine marketing in general, a little more understandable.

For more information, see www.google.com/howgoogleworks.