No one truly knows how Google Search works—not even Google. Its algorithm is a closely guarded secret, constantly evolving to prevent manipulation and deliver the best results. From business strategy to technical complexity, here’s why Google’s search engine remains an unsolvable mystery.
There are two categories of reasons why this is the case:
- Business Reasons
- Technical Reasons
Business Reasons
While everyone knows that Google makes money through ads, that doesn’t really tell you why they need to keep their Search Algorithm an industry secret. How does controlling what websites get displayed in organic search lead to revenue from the Ads Team?
Maintaining Quality Results
If you think through Google’s business model logically, you can come to a few key conclusions about how they make money:
- In order for businesses to pay for ads, they need to be seen
- therefore, Google needs to constantly reach huge audiences
- Visitors want a good user experience or they will stop using your tools
- therefore, Google needs to provide a good user experience
- For Search, a good user experience depends on the quality of the results
- therefore, Google needs to provide good quality search results
- Good quality search results means showing the most useful and accurate result
- therefore, Google needs to show the most useful and accurate result
- For Search, a good user experience depends on the quality of the results
- therefore, Google needs to provide good quality search results
- Good quality search results means showing the most useful and accurate result
- therefore, Google needs to show the most useful and accurate result
Naturally, this means that webmasters who try and game the system likely don’t have the best quality results for a given query.
So, for Google to maintain its position as the number one search engine, it needs to provide good results and prevent bad-actors from messing with their algorithm. By keeping the algorithm secret, it’s much more difficult for webmasters to take advantage of weaknesses in the search logic.
When I first started creating websites for fun in highschool in the mid-90s, it was easy to get a page to rank at the top of Yahoo or AltaVista. All you had to do was stuff the keywords you wanted and magically you could see your site show up at the top of the results.
I was able to mess with meta tags, add content with repeating words, and hide keywords using tiny fonts or by changing the font color to match the background. Any of these tricks was sophisticated enough to fool the search engines without ruining the user experience on the page.
Then Google came out and these tricks stopped working. We quickly realized that “backlinks” was the way to go so I would join link-exchange groups to gain more links to my sites. Eventually that stopped working too and we had to move on to the next trick. And so the game went on and on. The algorithm kept getting smarter and webmasters and developers had to come up with new tricks to fool the machine.
Fast forward to 2024 and the machine is so sophisticated that, at best, it’s a guess which metrics are valuable to search and how much weight is given to any given factor. Google is also a giant machine that is able to continually tweak and improve their algorithm making it near impossible to keep up.
Technical Reasons
Business intention aside, there are also many practical, technical limitations as to why no one really knows how the algorithm works.
The most obvious reason why no one knows how the algorithm works is that it’s simply too big and complex.
Anyone who has ever worked on a megaproject of any kind (be it in construction or tech) can tell you that there is no way to intimately understand every part of it. Google’s Search Algorithm is a megaproject that’s been going on since Larry Page and Sergey Brin were building Google in their dorm room.
Although we don’t know how many engineers Google has working on “Core Search”, in 2018, Sundar Pichai (CEO at the time) testified that it’s about 1,000
Out of 1,000 engineers, there may be a small handful that understand the theory of how the pieces fit together but it would be impossible for any one human to fully understand it.
Search Results are a Black Box
The way software works, you often take a bunch of input, feed it into the code, and see what kind of results you get. When you get unexpected or undesired results, you go in and tweak the system but there’s no telling what else it might affect when you feed new data in. Typically, we consider these to be bugs.
Speaking as an experienced developer myself, no developer has a crystal ball that covers all use cases and predicts output 100%. If it were possible, it would make software development a lot easier.
The thing is, with 1,000 engineers all solving tiny bugs in a giant megaproject, it becomes near impossible to predict all of the factors and how they impact the results.
AI Code
Finally, like every other giant tech company in the world right now, Google is starting to employ AI to write some of its code:
“More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers,” Pichai said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call. In short, from a technical standpoint, Google Search is somewhat of a hyperobject (a term coined by Timothy Morton)
- Vast and All-Encompassing: Google Search is embedded in almost every aspect of modern life, from personal inquiries to business operations, from research to entertainment. It spans the entire globe, processing billions of searches every day. The sheer scale of information it organizes, indexes, and retrieves makes it a hyperobject.
- Temporal and Spatial Stretch: Google Search isn’t confined to a single moment or place. It operates 24/7, across the entire world, and the information it gathers spans historical data, real-time updates, and future predictions. It's both immediate and temporally expansive, stretching across time and space in ways that are hard for any single user to fully comprehend.
- Incomprehensible Complexity: The algorithms, the data structures, the indexing systems, and the sheer volume of information Google handles are far beyond the cognitive capacities of any one person to fully understand. Even if you’re an expert, understanding the whole scope of how Google Search operates at a global scale is a monumental task.
- Interconnectedness: Google Search is deeply entangled with numerous other systems—social media platforms, news outlets, e-commerce sites, and more. It doesn't just exist in isolation; it is a part of a vast web of digital information that can have profound effects on the world, from shaping public opinion to influencing market trends. The interconnections of Google Search with these other systems also give it characteristics of a hyperobject.
- Beyond Human Perception: While we interact with Google Search regularly, we can only grasp a fraction of its operations at any given moment. The entire system, with its back-end infrastructure and the billions of potential queries and results, operates in a way that exceeds our everyday perception.
In summary, Google Search is an example of a technological hyperobject: a system that’s too vast, too complex, and too interconnected to be fully understood by any single human mind.
How to Rank Well
So, knowing all of the above, where does this leave us? How do we actually rank well organically?
Luckily, Google does provide some of the answers directly. I’ve thought a lot about Google’s business over my two-plus decades working in tech and marketing and I find the company’s tech and history infinitely fascinating. I’ve had close friends work at Google and have therefore had the pleasure of discussing some of these subjects with them to get a Googler’s take on the subject.