Originally Posted on 20.07.2011 reviewed for 2021
Essentially at the core and in basic terms Google works in the same way now as a decade ago. The three stages are, crawling: being able to “see” content. Indexing: adding to Google database. Serving results: sending pages to your device when you search.
You can read a bit more here: The basics of how Search works
A new video from Google explains how it works and complements the older one from Matt Cutts, (one of the first Google employees and the webspam team leader), that anyone in SEO prior to 2015 will know who he is. Maybe not so much for the anyone coming into the field since then,
THE BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 2011
At the best of times it is really hard to explain to people that aren’t familiar with SEO and search engines, how search works. I found this well crafted video on Google’s corporate page where Matt Cutts, one of their most well known employees talks about the process of indexing pages and making them available for search by you, me and everyone else.
Watch the “How Search Works” video below
The thing to bare in mind as pointed out in the video is that when you search Google or any other search engine like Bing or Yahoo, you are not actually searching the web, you are in fact searching the portion of the web indexed by that search engine.
One of the reasons Google is by far the most popular and efficient engine is that they index pages really quickly. That is if the given pages match their quality criteria and have no technical issues that prevent the spiders (the robots that index pages) from collecting and storing a copy of the page.
The picture should be a bit more clear now, if your site is not showing up on Google or you want to know how many pages of your site are indexed you can use a special operator, for example site:pedromatias.co.uk will give you all the pages indexed for this site. Just replace the web address with your own and that’s it.
If you need help with getting your site showing up on Google or gain better results be sure to get in touch and you can also browse and search this site where you will find more information and tools.
