So, turns out it took me three years and a comment from my colleague on my post to get the motivation to write the 2nd part of my previous post. You can visit this link to read about first part, but if you are a lazy lad like me, then you can get the idea of part 1 from the summary below:

Summary from Part-1:

The part 1 covers the basic idea of how the search engine works.

I have:

• Talked on some facts about how many users are there on internet. As it was written 3 years back, so obviously the numbers mentioned there are now increased many-fold.
• Also talked about few big giants in search engine industry, out of which, Google is the prominent one. Google have grown rapidly these years, that is why its market share is now increased from 65% to %88.47 by the end of April 2019.
• And talked about world famous Google Crawler, how it works, its crawling and indexing process in details, that how Google crawler collect data from website to website and sort it out, I am talking about terabytes to petabytes of data. You would ask how big is a petabyte (pb) so to give you an idea petabyte is like 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.

Your contribution: You can contribute in this article by answering following questions in comment section at the end of this post:

• What are the next two data storage units called, which are even bigger than petabyte? Hint (EB, ZB)
• How many Gigabytes and terabytes are there in a petabyte?

Now instead of making my summary part as a long article I will leave it hear and will continue to 2nd part. You can visit here to read 1st part in details.

What is indexing?

So, the crawler had done its part i.e. grabbing all the information from the World Wide Web now what’s next? Well now it’s time to index the data into database, which is also a very busy section, where search engine has to deal with tons of data to sort out and save it in its databank in a fashion which is easily accessible at the time of retrieval.

In indexing process search engine sorts out all websites based on different categories, and make the index of all sites. Just to give you an idea about the size of data Google search engines have to deal with, there are 16 data centers currently Google own for this purpose at different locations. The fiber optic network used for these servers is 200,000 times faster than a typical home network. These servers handle everything from processing billions of searches and hosting YouTube videos, to protecting your email from virus attacks.

What is search algorithm?

In easy words search algorithm is a program, which solves search problems. Its main purpose is to retrieve information stored in any of 2.5 million servers owned by google, spread around the world in 16 Google data centers. The algorithm is evolved with passage of time and is efficient enough to serve the right information against user’s query. Every time a user search for a query in Google, it finds all the available results from its storage and display most relevant results in SERP, and all it takes less than 0.2 seconds to process any query and retrieving the results.

Note that the image above is nothing to do with google search algorithm, so dont waste your time in learning the logic above. Google’s search algorithm is a business secret which is kept secret for their own benefit.

What Is SERPs

SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages are the pages populated with output result against any user query. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query, although the pages may also contain other results such as videos, images etc. When a search engine returns its search results, it gives you two types of results:

• Organic Results
• Paid Results

Organic Results:

Organic search results are the Web page listings that most closely match the user's search query based on relevance. Also called “seo” search results. Google show these results free of charge. Here comes the role of Search algorithm which decides which result to show out of millions of records. There are more than 500 factors, based on which search algorithm decide most relevant results to show to its users. Ranking high in the organic results is what SEO is all about. Google keeps updating it algorithm to eliminate spam results. You can read about these algorithm updates on Moz, they have maintained complete information about google updates here since 2000 till date.

Paid Results:

Paid results are basically advertisements — the Web site owners have paid to have their Web pages display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search query containing those keywords.

Anatomy of SERPs

Change is the only constant in life, same applies in SERPs. Google keeps experimenting with results to show on SERPs. In initial days, there were different pages for different types of results like web, images, videos, news etc. And users have to visit specific category page based on their nature of query. Say if user is looking for image, he must go to image category to find his image related results.

Although these category pages still exist in Google SERPs but now Google can serve different types of results to show in single SERP, it could be image or video carousel, knowledge graph, local listing and many more. All this is to serve the most relevant information to the users. Considering that, the structure of SERP result can be different for different query intents. Like if your query intent is to find a local business the SERPs might consist of local listings along with text listings, or if your query intent is to find information the SERP may show a knowledge graph. Let’s discuss these in details below: 

Local Pack:

The Local Pack is a section of Google’s search results that shows the local business listing based on your query. Whenever your query has local intent, Google will show three local businesses that might answer your query.

A little while back these local packs were referred to as the 7-pack, as they displayed 7 of the most popular businesses in the area. In keeping up with growing mobile phone usage, Google cut down their 7-Pack down to just three results, along with some changes to the ways the algorithm ranks local results. Now when you search for local businesses, whether on desktop or phone, you will be shown the 3-Pack.

Even more recently, Google has started trialing a “paid spot” in their highly coveted 3-Pack. Google’s local 3-pack of organic listings may begin to show an extra ad for certain searches.

Knowledge graph:

In 2012, Google added an expansion of search results with a widget on entities in the Knowledge Graph. In the Knowledge Graph people, places or the circumstances of various facts, images and associated search queries are displayed in a dedicated area if Google recognizes a semantic entity behind a search term.

On desktops and tablets the Knowledge Graph is displayed on the right, next to the organic search results; on smartphones the display is above the search results. The following elements can be included in the separate info box:

• Data on a company, a person or a location
• Image(s) with a link to Google Image Search
• Text extract as well as a link to the source
• Prepared, structured data with details on the search query

There are many more features that google have tested in all these years, few got success and few faced failures. I will write on all these features in a separate post some other time. To sum up my article I will like to share some tips and tricks that I have learned in these years which helped me a lot in my SEO profession as well as normal use of Google. 

Tips and Tricks:

Following are few useful tips and tricks, many of them you might have already known. Google is now smart enough in providing information that instead of simply giving you links to different websites for your quick questions, now it can answer your quick queries right away some examples are as below:

Check Website’s Cache Version:

You can check website’s version which is currently indexed in google:

Cache:{your website}

“cache:google.com”

Check how many pages are index In google for any given website:

Site:{your website}

“site:google.com”

Search for only specific file type:

{your search term} filetype:pdf

seo tips filetype:pdf

Search for results from a specific website:

{your search term} site:{yoursite}

seo algorithms history site:moz.com

Current Time:

Want to know current time of any location.

“Current Time”, “Current time in London”

Calculator:

Need a calculator for basic or scientific calculations just write “Calculator” or for a quick calculation simply put the equation like “2 plus 2”, “3 * 150”

Conversion:

Write directly your conversions query and you will get your converter widget straight on your screen. “USD 5 to AED”, “cm to mm”, “1 inch to cm”, “1 km to m” and so on.

Weather:

Check current temperature of any area:

“Current Temperature”, “Current Temperature of Dubai”

Area of places:

Find out the area of any place like city, town or country:

“Area of Dubai”, “Area of Sharjah”

Distance:

Find the distance between different cities our countries:

“Distance from Dubai to Sharjah”

Check Flight status:

You can check your flight status by simply putting the flight number:

“PA325”

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