Inside Out
How Google searches the world in
two-tenths of a second
Your search results appear!
The final results appear on
the results page, sorted by the
PageRank score of each result.
The results even include a rel-
evant excerpt, courtesy of the
document servers. Shockingly
enough, only two-tenths of a
second have elapsed.Index servers find the
perfect match
The index servers compare
the terms in your query
to the millions of terms in
Google’s index. Then they
determine which web pages
contain all of the same
terms, and pass them off to
Document servers the document servers.
prep and deliver data
The document servers attach
cached versions of the result
web pages to the query results
and prep them for the results
page.3
4
5
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When you press Search...
Your query is irrevocably
entered into the system.
Whether you searched for
‘CPU reviews’ or ‘goat pr0n’
your results are less than half
a second away.^2
Google’s web server
hands off your search
to the index server
Your search begins at the
web server that hosts
http://www.google.com, but
it doesn’t stay there for
long. It’s immediately
passed off to Google’s
powerful index servers.