First things first…When you search for an item on Google, you are actually not searching the we

You are searching an index maintained by Google (to understand the difference, perform same search on google.com and bing.com –you will get different results).

To make it simple, think of it as that detailed index that we have at the end of most books.

Google, to fetch the information you need, does the same thing a little more effectively. Or should I say a lot more effectively?

When you search a term, the web spiders fetch a few pages (for the sake of simplicity, let us assume they fetch 4 pages). Now each of these 4 pages, hypothetically, point to 3 links. So the total pages Google has in sight are 4 (initial) + 12 (4 pages and each has 3 links) = 16. Now imagine that this continues, because each page has further links. So, Google suddenly will have millions of pages that talk about your search item.

How would now Google decide which ones to show to you?

Google will introspect and do some checks before pushing the results to you:

Some of the checks Google performs are:

a) How many times do these words appear in each of the million pages found?

b) Does the title include Hippo/Hippo food/what hippos eat etc.?

c) Does the URL say Hippo/Hippo Food etc.?

d) Any synonyms for any of the words in the search term?

It also checks the quality of each of the pages. What is authority of the website on this topic? Authority: Now you are considered to be an authority on a subject if a lot of people come to you for that topic. Similarly, if a lot of websites are pointing towards one particular site, it enhances that site’s authority/quality. But then the quality of the sites pointing is also considered.

All of this, to give you what you were searching for. In less than a second.