Charles Lau dot Com

Let me give you my story of how I think Google Search Engine works. Why the page ranking has to be updated only every few months? Why google indexing is so much faster? Why it is so

Crawling for information
Because everyone of us wants to search the most current information about the web changes. We search the web to get what we want. And that is Google’s core business of service to each and every one of us. Hence, the web crawler simple indexes the url and bind the keywords together which it has found. Then the web crawler will store it in one of its database.

Indexing the information being crawled
The database server is to spread its latest information to every other database servers in the world. And very soon, all the database servers will be indexed with the latest information (the url, the cache and the relevent keywords).

Displaying the information retrieved from database
Now, when we search for information, it will be shown on the website by retrieving from its selected database. It has a great work balancing methodology inside which calls for a certain database to work with its website whenever a user searches for a keyword. Hence, we wouldn’t be experiencing a lag in the information speed on our part. Everything will be seen as a smooth search every time!

Page Rank
The problem comes when Google has to determine which site should receive more page rank than the other. First of all, Google has to do a search in the database for all the backlinks for every website. It can be a tedious job because when we type in a sql query of the database which involves probably more than thousands of records for just a website, it is going to take very slow process to produce the result. And when the result is up, the Google employees have to determine which site has to receive higher page rank than the rest.

Just imagine that your site is only linked (voted) by a 10 Page-Ranked website. Only one link. That’s to say that you have such an important presence on earth because of the high recommendation. How about a site which is linked by tens of thousands of zero page ranked websites? Who should get a higher page rank here?

And the number of links to a site is ever increasing. Sometimes, I believe the Google employees have to give their rankings by estimation which is out of their calculation scope… It’s not easy to rank a site after all…

I have noticed that the page rank is updated as soon as the backlinks are updated on Google database… That’s to say that they are updating the backlinks altogether.

Well, it’s just a thought…