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"It only takes half a second for Google to return a search based on keywords you type in, but there's a whole lot more happening behind the scenes to give you the results you need. Google on Monday launched a video that explains the science behind how the massive search engine actually works.\nMatt Cutts,  software engineer head of Google's webspam team, details in a YouTube video how the search engine giant thoroughly scours the web on a daily basis to provide the most up-to-date results to users.\n\"There are three things you need to do to be the best search engine in the world. First, you need to crawl the web comprehensively and deeply, then you want to rank or serve those pages and return the most relevant ones first,\" Cutts said.\nAlthough Google crawls the web on a daily basis, that wasn't always the case.\n\"We used to crawl for 30 days\u2026 and then index for about a week and push that data out \u2014 and that would take about a week,\" Cutts said. \"Sometimes you would hit a data center with new data and sometimes you would hit a data center with old data.\"\nBut this method wasn't optimized since a lot of the information would be out of date. In 2003, Google switched to crawling a significant amount of the Internet each day. By scouring the web each day for new content, it incrementally updated its index.\n\nSEE ALSO: How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC]\n\"We have gotten even better over time, and at this point, we can keep it very fresh,\" Cutts said.\nTo do so, page rank is the key deciding factor as to how likely you are to see a link: \"We basically take page rank as the primary determinant and the more page rank you have \u2014 that is, the more people that link to you and the more reputable those people are \u2014 the more likely it is that we will discover your page relatively early in the crawl,\" Cutts said.\nGoogle also places a lot of emphasis on word order. For example, a search for pop singer \"Katy Perry\" will look for results with those two words next to each other, rather than having \"Katy\" and the word \"Perry\" show up in different parts of the content. \nFinding the right balance between word proximity, page reputation and links pointing to it is the key.\n\"That's kind of the secret sauce,\" Cutt added.\nGoogle then sends that query out to hundreds of different machines all at once, which look through their fraction of the web that has been indexed to find the best match.\n\"We say, 'what's the best page that matches this query across our entire index?'' Cutts said. \"We take that page and we try to show it with a useful snippet, so we show the keywords in the context of the document and get it all back in under half a second.\"\nHow do you think companies can use this information to better show up in Google search results? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.\nThumbnail via iStockphoto, franckreporter.\nBONUS: 10 Great Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses of Google\n\n\n10 Great Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses of Google\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n1. Life at the Googleplex\nThis official Google vid offers a tour of Google HQ (a.k.a. the \"Googleplex\") in 200 seconds. Most interesting snippet of info? There are more than 200 dogs on campus on any given day. Woof!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n2. Google - Best Place to Work 2007\nOffering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Google from an NBC news report's perspective, this clip was shot just after Google had been named America's best place to work by Fortune back in 2007.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3. Google's New Zurich office\nGoogle's Zurich office is up there as one of the top premises in terms of wackiness. Here, Web User Magazine has a little nose around -- be sure to keep watching to the end for a quick look at the old fashioned library room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4. Inside Google's New York Office\nThe New York offices look just as sweet as Google's Silicon Valley headquarters. The building in the Big Apple has the second largest footprint of any NYC structure -- so big that the Googlers get round on scooters, leaving them in special scooter \"parking bays.\" Watch out for the LEGO wall and really cool floor map.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n5. Inside Google Australia\nThere aren't a lot of revelations in this Aussie clip (the usual colorful offices, look at all the food and oooh, there's a ping pong table) but it goes some way to show that Google manages to keep its wacky office set up even 7,000 miles around the globe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n6. Google Office - Madison, WI\nWhile it's hardly Google's most famous office, the Madison, Wisconsin location adds a good dose of the usual Google zaniness and manages to incorporate some of the building's history into its decor -- truly a unique workspace for all those lucky Googlers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n7. Google Chicago Headquarters Tour\nWGN News gets a tour of Google's premises in the windy city where we find out just how those \"Recent Searches\" displays in Google's lobbies remain so smut-free.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n8. Google's Chicago Games Room\nAnd -- as we didn't see this in the previous tour -- here's a look at the cool game room within the Chicago complex. It's like your dream lounge, but with more geeks.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n9. Google in St. Petersburg  \nAn insider look at a Google office in Russia transcends any language barriers, although what's with all the soft toys?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n10. Google Container Data Center Tour\nGoogle isn't just about the colorful offices and crazy fun. It's also about the million or so servers that keep us Googling. Here Google opens the door to a data center in a somewhat dry video that will no doubt be fascinating to anyone in the industry!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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