[typewriter keys clack]
[Matt Cutts] Hi, my name is Matt Cutts.
I'm an engineer in the quality group at Google
and I'd like to talk today about what happens
when you do a web search.
The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search,
you aren't actually searching the web, you're searching Google's index of the web
or at least as much of it as we can find.
We do this with software programs called spiders.
Spiders start by fetching a few web pages then they follow the links on those pages
and fetch the pages they point to and follow all the links on those pages
and fetch the pages they link to and so on
until we've indexed a pretty big chunk of the web,
many billions of pages stored across thousands of machines.
Now, suppose I want to know how fast a cheetah can run.
I type in my search, say, cheetah running speed and hit return.
Our software searches our index to find every page
that includes those search terms.
In this case, there are hundreds of thousands of possible results.
How does Google decide which few documents I really want?
By asking questions, more than 200 of them.
Like, how many times does this page contain your keywords?
Do the words appear in the title, in the URL, directly adjacent?
Does the page include synonyms for those words?
Is this page from a quality website or is it low quality, even spamming?
What is this page's PageRank?
That's a formula invented by our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
that rates a web page's importance
by looking at how many outside links point to it, and how important those links are.
Finally, we combine all those factors together
to produce each page's overall score and send you back your search results,
about half a second after you submit your search.
At Google, we take our commitment to delivering useful
and impartial search results very seriously.
We don't ever accept payment to add a site to our index,
update it more often, or improve its ranking.
Let's take a look at my search results.
Each entry includes a title, a URL, and a snippet of text
to help me decide whether this page is what I'm looking for.
I also see links to similar pages,
Google's most recent stored version of that page,
and related searches that I might want to try next.
And sometimes, along the right and at the top I'll see ads.
We take our advertising business very seriously as well,
both our commitment to deliver the best possible audience for advertisers
and to strive to only show ads that you really want to see.
We're very careful to distinguish your ads from regular search results
and we won't show you any ads at all
if we can't find any that we think will help you find the information
you're looking for which, in this case,
the cheetah's top running speed, is more than 60 miles an hour.
Thanks for watching,
I hope this made Google a little bit more understandable.