How Google SEARCH Works

Here is a quick overview

How Search Works (Google engineer)

How Google Works (HowStuffWorks)

Here are some questions to answer about Google:

1. Was Google the "first" search engine?  If not, then who was and what happened to them?
   
2. Google has lots of servers - how many?  Where are they?  How big are they?
3. If you make a web-site (or web-page), will it appear in Google?
   Immediately?  Later?  Do you need to pay for this privilege?
4. Google's search engine is "free".  How can Google afford to offer this for free?
5. How many people use Google each day?  How many searches are done each day?
6. What is SEO?  How can you force your page to be at the top of Google's search results?
7. What is a "spider" or "crawler"?  How does it work?
8. When you search for something, like "where can I get free stuff online",
   how does Google decide which results to put on the first page?
9. Does Google "know" what you like?  Do they give different search results
   to different people?  How is that possible?
10. Describe several different ways of measuring web-page "popularity".
    
11. What Operating System is used on Google's servers?  Why?
12. What is an "index"?  How does Google make an index?
13. Does Google index the whole web, or only part of it?  Why?
    
14. Describe how search engines functioned in the 1990s.
    Compare this to how Google's search engine works.
15. Describe how search engine effectiveness could improve in the future.