by Hiruni Manawadu
Asking ‘Who puts facts into Google?’ is a little misleading because there isn’t a single person involved but hundreds and it’s not really a process of putting something ‘into’ Google but instead is an act of retrieval. The question is perhaps better asked as ‘How does Google find and return facts?’
Google gets information from public databases on the internet, user submitted content, and web pages. It then simply presents to you the information. Google goes through three processes to give you accurate search results. The first process is crawling. This is where they use a huge amount of computers to run a program called Googlebot. Googlebot looks at a list of websites to be crawled and checks them for other links. It then adds them to the Google index. The second step is called indexing. Indexing is where Google tries to find what a page is about by analyzing the content on the website. It then adds this information to the Google index, a giant database that is in many computers. The third and final step is called serving. When a user types in a query, Google uses the Google index to find the best answer for best user experience. They factor in things like the person’s language and location. In short, Google goes through many programs and processes to give you quality and accurate results, but they don’t insert information into google. That information comes from creators and users.