In pre-Internet times, searching for more specific information took longer than today’s milliseconds before the results appeared on our screens. Currently, more than 90% of these results are provided by Google, and more specifically its search engine Google Search, which is the most visited and used in the world.

It all started in 1995 when computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University on a campus tour. The two became very close friends and did research together in the mathematics of the World Wide Web.

During their research, they realized that the web pages were linking to each other, but there was no record of the paths that data took. And it was in this topic that we decided to go deeper.

Back in ’96, they decided to create an algorithm called PageRank that ranked the importance of websites by analyzing how many times, where, and in what context keywords appeared on pages.

To test the algorithm, Page and Brin created a search engine called BackRub that successfully found a large number of sites using this method. What is very curious about BackRub is that the computer it was stored on was made of Lego and had ten 4 gigabyte disks.

These two creations were a test drive for what in September 1997 would be called Google Search, or simply Search. The name is inspired by the number of googols, which is increased to one hundred, with the intention of showing the incredible ability of the search engine to work with large amounts of data.

To get an idea of ​​the scale that Search has already taken on, it only needed to use half the bandwidth of Stanford University’s internet to work properly! Since then, processing capabilities and response quality have only improved.

search engine

As mentioned, Google search uses the PageRank algorithm to prioritize page results that are more closely related to what the user is searching for. But that’s just part of what’s going on behind the search engine.

When we search in Search, we take information not exactly from the Internet, but from a copy of a part of it, called an index. This process includes several steps:

1. Scanning: Google uses bots known as Spiders or Googlebot to systematically crawl the web. These bots follow links from page to page, visiting websites and collecting information about their content. They update the Google index regularly by uploading new pages and updating existing pages.
2. Indexing: Once crawled, Googlebot processes the collected web pages and adds them to the Google index. During this process, page content such as text, images, and other elements is parsed and stored on servers.
3. Content analysis: Google uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze and understand the content of indexed pages. It examines text, page structure, internal and external links, HTML tags, and other elements to determine content context and relevance.
4. Classification of results: When a user performs a search, Google compares the query to its index and ranks pages based on various factors such as relevance, content quality, site authority, and user experience. The PageRank algorithm mentioned earlier plays an important role in this ranking process.
5. Presentation of results: Google displays search results on a results page, usually with a list of links with titles, descriptions, and URLs. In addition, it can provide additional features such as featured snippets, direct response fields, images, videos, and other relevant elements depending on the request.

Currently, the Google index contains over 100 petabytes of data, accumulating billions of pages and delivering them at extremely high speeds. An example of this can be done by looking at the number of results and the rate at which they were found in the search bar.

It is clear that Google will spare no effort to support its search engine with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that helps improve search for more accurate results, filtering and learning from the user’s search database.

And at Google I/O 2023, the company’s annual technology conference, it was announced that Search will be enhanced with generative AI. That is, we will have a Bard next to the Search navigation bar, helping users get more complete, objective and understandable answers.

appearance and doodles

Google, like any major tech player, needed to create a visual identity for their brand that was memorable to represent their company. And they decided to base their visual identity around their logo, which uses primary colors and currently sans-serif fonts to help make it look more memorable.

The logo has already changed seven times, the first three versions of it are the most distinct, but they already had the same color palette that has survived to this day. The search engine layout has always been very minimalistic without polluting the field of view of the users, leaving the page very clean and balanced.

During a trip to the Burning Man festival in August 1998, the founders decided to give a warning that the site would not undergo maintenance during that period by displaying the festival’s logo next to the company’s logo.

This is how the first doodle appeared, a drawing that adorns the Google logo on memorable dates. Some arts have become famous thanks to the opening elements that appeared for the first time, here are some of them:

The first animated doodle was made for Halloween 2000 by artist Laurie Loeb.

The first interactive doodle aired in 2010 to celebrate PAC-MAN’s 30th anniversary, with a doodle that let you play a copy of the game inside the Google logo. The tribute made by Marcin Vichari is pretty faithful to the original, even with the ability to play co-op.

The first 360° doodle was created by the Google team and the French Cinematheque in honor of the director and illusionist Georges Méliès. In the doodle, you follow an animation of Méliès himself watching several of his films.

Beyond the logo itself, the company maintains a visual identity for its products that match the colors of the logo; Google Drive, Photos, Play, Maps and Gmail are some of the products that follow the big tech visual rule.

Reflections

With $279.8 billion in annual revenue in 2022, of which $224.7 billion came from Google Ads alone, Google Search has become the most profitable search engine in the world. This shows that the company has managed to create a platform that users love and maintains a consistent quality of their products.

And, of course, behind every great success there are great contradictions. Google has come under fire for its practices in collecting personal user data and how that data is used to target ads.

There have been concerns about transparency and user consent in this process, and the company is currently trying to maintain a greater degree of transparency by having a dedicated page only to explain to the user their rights and data.

In addition to the fact that the platform is in constant conflict with the courts of several countries due to the amount of inappropriate content or the spread of false information that is in the search engine index. The platform has already taken it upon itself to focus efforts on combating this type of content and provides tools for users to file complaints themselves.

Google isn’t perfect, of course, any company that makes profit as its ultimate goal, even if it provides great tools for everyday life, ends up in very delicate situations. To deny the quality of bigtech and its products is to deny reality, but there are other great companies out there with great products ready to be used.

Source: Learn how Google search works, Google – Wikipedia, see 20 historical doodles selected by Google – Mega Curioso, turbocharged search with generative artificial intelligence, Google revenue 2002-2022. | Statista, Google: Advertising revenue in 2022 | Statista, the evolution of Google Doodles, 1998–2018