Google has just released an animated and interactive Web site called 'How Search Works' that spells out the A -- Z of search, in three parts.

• Crawling and Indexing
• Algorithms
• Fighting Spam

It's a beginner friendly site that feels like an infographic on steroids. It starts out explaining the crawling of a site and moves on from there. The idea is similar in style to last year's "Story of Send" -- the animated story of the journey of an email as it's a simple explanation, that has plenty of graphics and little tidbits of relevant information tucked away when clicked on. Both of these simple, almost cartoon-like explanations make us want to be sure they're teaching them at the local high schools.

So, if you prefer hard data instead of a warm and fluffy look at how things work then we suggest grabbing a cup of coffer (or a pot) and diving into the wealth of research papers that get into real detailed aspects of search.

In Part One: Crawling and Indexing, Google states they crawl each site by following site links. Site owners get to choose if they want their site crawled (as all you Google Webmasters know). With over 30 trillion pages and growing, search engines have their work cut out for them. Each page is cached in the index, a large database that holds over 100 million gigabytes of information!

In Part Two: Algorithms, Google explains a few of the programs they use to determine you get what you're looking for. Autocomplete, Spelling, Synonyms, and different Search Methods are a few of the ways Google wants to help you complete your thoughts. From there, Google pulls and ranks relevant sites from the index. There are over 200 Factors involved in ranking! Results are split into different categories: Links & Snippets, the Knowledge Graph, Images, Videos, News, Mobile and more.

In Part Three: Fighting Spam, the different types of spam are shown. Google points out that most spam fighting is done automatically. Included are spam notification and reconsideration request statistics.

Millions of searches were performed in the two minutes of my viewing of this site! This is a great site to review and learn. It's worth a look and if you feel it's far to beginner for you then grab your kid and have them play with it for a bit. It's never too early to start :)

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