Basics of Google search.

Google search engine boasts of a simplified web interface that can be used even by a novice to search web, images, videos, groups and much more. A user simply has to type what they are looking for in the search field and press enter to view the results.
Google like other search engines makes use of specialized algorithm to produce results which are displayed in order of their relevance. Therefore Google search engine has three parts:
• Web crawler also known as Googlebot that searches and brings web pages
• Indexers whose main function is to sort every page for the keywords and than indexing the relevant keywords in a huge database.
• Lastly a query processor that compares the keyword which is being searched from the index and then displays pages that it considers most relevant.

1. Web crawling and other data gathering techniques.
Google search engine makes use of data gathering techniques like web crawlers and spiders. Google has a big index of all the most searched keywords and also the links where the details of these keywords could be located. Software robots popular known as spiders are used to build an extensive list of words by browsing through millions of webpage so as to speed up the later searches. This methodical process of creating keyword index is known as web crawling. The spiders usually start by going through the list of most widely used severs and extremely popular pages. Google search engine for getting faster results make use of minimum four spiders which indexes all the important keywords in a page located at titles, subtitles and Meta tags. To further speed up its searches Google makes use of its own DNS server.
Google than makes use of its algorithm known as PageRank which displays the result based on the relevancy which is determined based on factors like:
• Frequency of the keywords in the content and also their location. More the frequency higher is the ranking
• How many other sites link to that particular page
• Lastly the history of how long the page has been in existence also affects its search engine ranking.

2. Specialized search functions and operators
You can simplify your search using some specialized operators and functions such as:
• Use (+) operator while searching for a common word and you can use (-) sign if you want to omit a particular term from Google search. When you are using (+) and (-) operator don’t use any space after these signs
• If you are searching for an exact phrase you can surround it using double quotes (“”)
• (.) is considered by Google search engine as single character wildcard.
• Remember (*) is not used for completing any word as is normally the case with search engines.

In order to further refine the Google searches one can make use of advanced Google operators which are to be used using syntax:- operator:search_term. There should be no space left between the advanced operator, colon symbol and search term. If there is a space left then the operator will be treated like any other search term. If your search term is a phrase then there should be no space between colon and first term of the phrase. You can even use quotes with the phrase.

Some of the useful advanced search operators include:
• site: this operator should be used when the search is to be restricted to a particular domain or website
• filetype: operator is used to search for specific file type
• link: operator is used to search for a keyword within hyperlinks
• cache: you have to supply the URL of the website after this operator to know the version of the particular web page which is being crawled by google
• define: operator will return the definition for the searched term
• intitle: operator will make Google search for a particular term only in the titles
• inurl: operator will restrict the Google search within the URL.