When was the last time you searched Google, only to be met with an answer so perfectly crafted that you didn’t need to do anything more than just click through? It’s likely that you were so impressed with the answer, and possibly even convinced by it, that you didn’t even think about the methods behind how Google gets its answers. However, it’s worth taking a moment to see just what goes into Google providing such accurate results.


Is it Magic?

How does Google get all its answers to all of our questions? To be honest, we don't know. But one thing is for sure, it's not magic. In fact, we have a few theories as to where it might be getting some of its information. One theory is that the NSA has been using this data-gathering tool to collect personal information from users who search on google (many people do). The NSA has used this technology in order to spy on the user without their knowledge or consent. The other theory about how google gets its data is that the company mines through public websites like Facebook and Twitter in order to see what people are talking about or looking for. Another option is that the site can gain intelligence by listening in on your phone calls and reading your text messages. It can also mine databases of old e-mails, which could give it an edge over sites like Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL Mail and Gmail. Lastly, it could obtain data from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or even track customer purchase histories at stores such as Wal-Mart. These days you can find out anything with a quick google search - so long as you're willing to put up with the NSA spying on you too!


Behind the Scenes of the Search Engine

The search engine is like a giant library that stores all the websites, images, videos, news articles, and other content from across the web. Each webpage is tagged with small snippets of text called meta data which includes information about the page’s title, author, date it was published, how many times it has been viewed by other users, etc. Google’s algorithms look at this meta data to determine where to rank each webpage in the search results. For example, if there are two pages on the same topic but one of them has ten times as many views as the other one, then Google will prioritize ranking that more popular page higher than the less popular one. But why does Google know so much about everything? What makes Google such an expert on every topic under the sun? 

The answer is actually quite simple. Google crawls the web constantly, reading through billions of webpages to figure out what they’re about and record the information for future searches. And what do we say when we want to find something new or learn something new? We google it.


The History of Google

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students at Stanford University. In their research on the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, they would often consult a Digital Library Project called BackRub that was developed by one of their professors, Terry Winograd. One day while using BackRub, they realized that it had been overtaken by a new search engine named Goolge, which was created in 1995 by two Stanford graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. So, rather than improving the web crawler to make BackRub better, they took their ideas for web-crawling to another project - 

Goolge. By September 2000, Google became a company with six employees - including its founders. Google's mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Google has been able to accomplish this through indexing over 2 trillion words from over 100 million websites as well as 4 billion books since its conception. The process by which Google retrieves this data is based on their quest to index all the world's knowledge so that users can find any piece of data within 3 seconds or less. As a result, it has become the most visited website in existence because people want what they are looking for without having to type anything into google first. For example, if I type google, then google will show me how many different ways there are to spell the word, which you may not know unless you spend a lot of time typing things like googl (notice how there's an l after the o). If I have never heard of Baidu before and I wanted to compare it to Google, then I could simply type baidu vs. googl into Google and instantly get my answer.


What’s Going On in Our Heads When We Search

When you search for something on Google, it scans through the billions of pages that have been indexed by its crawlers. When it finds a match, it will rank the result according to relevance. The relevance is based on many factors including how often the page has been accessed in the past or other signals from your computer such as location or previous searches you’ve made. What's Going On in Our Heads When We Search: When you search for something on Google, it scans through the billions of pages that have been indexed by its crawlers. When it finds a match, it will rank the result according to relevance. Continuation (four sentences): The relevance is based on many factors including how often the page has been accessed in the past or other signals from your computer such as location or previous searches you've made. As we go about our day-to-day lives, we come across information that may be important later so we keep them stored in our memory. For example, if someone asks us what the capital of France is during a conversation and we don't know off the top of our head, we can use Google to find out. 

If you're curious about where Google gets all these answers, there are three things happening at once when you type a question into their search bar


Top 10 Interesting Facts about Google

-Its name is a play on the word googol, which means 10 to the 100th power. 

-It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, who were Ph.D students at Stanford University at the time. 

-There are over 1 billion websites hosted on Google's servers. -Every day, 20% of all worldwide internet searches are performed using Google. 

-90% of internet users use it daily as their primary search engine. 

-In 2004 it was reported that there were more than 3 billion searches per day being performed on google .com. -The top 5 countries performing the most searches on google each month are United States, China, India, Brazil, and Russia. 

-The official office space for Google occupies 180 acres (73 hectares) in Mountain View California with 822 000 square meters of office space. 

-According to market share data from Net Applications for December 2017, chrome has an estimated 52% usage share with Internet Explorer following closely behind with 41%. The remaining 7% is divided among other browsers such as Firefox and Safari. The majority of desktop browsing occurs through either Chrome or IE. 

-Operating systems that come bundled with Chrome include Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6). -Google holds around 54% of the global mobile phone operating system market share. Android is also open source, which means that developers can modify its code and make applications to run on Android devices without having to pay any licensing fees. As of September 2018, Android holds about 88% of the global smartphone operating system market share.


7 Things You Didn’t Know about Google

1. Google is a verb. 

2. Google was started by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 

3. When you search for weather San Francisco on google, you can see at the top left of the screen that there are different options to choose from besides just web like news or maps which will change depending on where you live in the world. 4. To use your voice with google instead of typing text, click the microphone button above the text box. 5. You can find out what happened today on this day in history by typing On this day then typing in a date such as On this day 1945 World War II Ends and pressing enter. 6. You can read books online using an app called Google Play Books which lets you download it onto your phone or tablet so you have it everywhere you go. 7. Google Translate has added more than 90 languages since it first launched in 2006 and you can switch between them by clicking the down arrow next to the text box while translating. 8. The more people use Google Search, the better answers they get because it uses machine learning which stores data about previous searches and makes predictions based on what’s most likely to be true. For example, if someone asks What time does my flight leave? and past experience shows that flights usually depart around 9 am, Google will predict the answer as 9 am. 9. Finally, when you type in anything on google, it takes less than one second before something pops up as the result which means they must know all of the answers to all questions!