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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 adds. 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.