The Inner Workings of Google Search: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

How Google Delivers Relevant Results in Milliseconds

Ayush Gupta
5 min readSep 30, 2024

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Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

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Google Search is one of the most complex and efficient systems in the world. It helps billions of users access the web’s knowledge quickly, returning relevant results in milliseconds.

From its humble beginnings to its evolution into one of the most advanced search engines in the world, Google continues to set the standard for search technology.

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, understanding the inner workings of Google Search is a journey into the cutting edge of information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and system scalability.

In this article, we’ll take a technical deep dive into how Google Search works, from crawling the web to indexing, ranking, and delivering results in real time.

Crawling: Discovering New Content

Google’s search begins with its crawlers.

A web crawler, or bot, is an automated system that scans the web to discover and download pages for indexing.

The most prominent crawler is Googlebot, which works tirelessly to scan billions of…

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Ayush Gupta
Ayush Gupta

Written by Ayush Gupta

Generalist || Sharing what I know || Software Engineering || AI || Game Theory || Life

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