TL;DR: Every time you search, there are thousands (sometimes millions!) of webpages or other types of content that might be a match. Google uses its robust systems to present the most helpful information in response to your search. Let’s take a closer look at how Google Search works, from the results you see to the spam you don’t.
To learn even more about Search visit How Search Works
Finding information by crawling
Most of our Search index is built through the work of software known as crawlers. These automatically visit publicly accessible webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. Crawlers go from page to page to organize the content of the web in Google's Search index.
Organizing information by indexing
When crawlers find a webpage, our systems render the content of the page, just as a browser does. We take note of key signals — from keywords to website freshness — and we keep track of it all in the Search index.
The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It’s like the index in the back of a book — with an entry for every word seen on every webpage we index. When we index a webpage, we add it to the entries for all of the words it contains.
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