 Search is a powerful tool. It allows users to find, share, and access an almost infinite amount of content, regardless of how or where they connect. Understanding how Google Search works is essential if you have an online business and you want your customers to find you. Whether you have a website, blog, social media profile, or Google My Business listing, Google goes through a whole journey to find your business, categorize it, and show it to your potential customers. First of all, Google needs to realize your business has a presence on the web. For this, Google constantly searches for new content to add to its huge catalog. This discovery process is called crawling. Google generally discovers web pages by following links from page to page, finding new content never seen before. Once the Google crawler, which we call Googlebot, has found your website, it has to understand what the content is all about. This process is called indexing. Just as you would organize the inventory of your store, whether it's shoes, sweaters, or dresses, Google analyzes the content on your page and saves this information to its index, a database considered to be the biggest library in the world. How can you help the Google index understand your content better? Learn more about that at the link in the description below. Alright, now Google has found your website, and Googlebot knows you have an online shop that sells clothes. What happens next? When a user types a search query, Google's system sort through hundreds of billions of web pages in the search index, looking for the most useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. This step is called ranking. For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions of web pages with potentially relevant information. Google has to determine the highest quality and most relevant answers, returning the content that provides the best user experience and most appropriate results. Some of these factors may include the user's location, language, and device type. For example, searching for buy a nice shirt might show different answers to a user searching from New York than it would to a user searching from Miami. Remember, Google's search results are organic and generated through sophisticated algorithms to make thousands of calculations for each search in a fraction of a second, based only on the relevance of a page to a user's query. Google never accepts payment from anyone to be included in organic search results or to alter a page's ranking in any way. When you use Google search, ads may appear with your search results, but they are clearly labeled so they are easy to distinguish from the rest of the page. So now you know that. Google crawls the web to discover new content. Google indexes the content, categorizing it like a catalog, and Google's ranking systems scan the index to serve the most relevant results to users. If you'd like to learn more about how search works and how to improve your site's visibility in Google search, follow the Google Webmaster guidelines, read our SEO starter guide, and visit the Webmaster portal, your one-stop shop for support documentation. Links to these resources are in the description below. Be sure to check out the next episode. Is my website searchable on Google search? And don't forget to subscribe.