The Basic Google Process

People often wonder where those Google search results come from.  So being a somewhat smart individual I thought I would try and explain it to those of you are interested.  

The process for Google is actually a three stage process that includes the following stages:

1.  Crawling

2.  Indexing

3.  Serving

Google has something they call a "Googlebot".  Sometimes this is also called a "bot", "robot", or "spider" but they are all the same.  These little bots are what crawl the internet looking for websites.  Anytime one of these bots finds a new link it will generally follow this link.  That is one reason why in-bound links to your site are so important.

Crawling is the way that Google finds news websites or pages that have been updated.  These bots are directed (we think) by the algorithms that Google uses and the sites already listed in the Google index.  These bots are told how often to crawl a site and how many pages should be indexed with each crawl.

Indexing is basically the way the Google stores the crawled information on it’s servers.  Google indexes keywords and phrases, date of crawl, title tags and other information.  It is like a huge library of all the internet information the bots can find.

Serving is the way that Google presents this information to you when you do a search.  Google presents this information to you in what it considers to be the most relevant to your search.  How is relevancy is determined is a closely guarded secret but some people have reported that it contains upwards of over 200 factors.

So now that you have a basic understanding of how a Google search works could someone explain to me where my socks go when I wash them?