Bangalore: Google, in an attempt to give people an idea of the work that goes into making the search engine as successful as it is, has published an “under the Hood” page. The page threw light on the number of changes made every day that helped Google, which was launched in 1997, evolve to the giant it is now.

 Rajan Patel, a search scientist at Google said that several hundred signals make up Google’s search algorithm. Google developers conduct a number of experiments in search engine algorithms that help improve its ranking relevance, its speed, and its accuracy. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow said that about 500 changes are made every year in the search algorithms so that users find the most useful information returned when they search for it. This would mean that algorithms are changed every day or twice in a day.

The latest modification made to the Google search that made news was that of “Search Plus Your World” which triggered outbursts from Twitter.

Google indexes every new query that comes in on the search bar, essentially including billions of websites which make the index over 100 million gigabytes. Google, on the “Under the hood” page, stated a number of facts about the queries it processes each day, which highlight the efficiency of the search algorithm.  A query travels about 1500 miles in order to return the answer to the user.  Google processes about 1 billion search entries each day, and 20 percent of the unique queries that Google gets every day are new to the engine.

At the moment, the search engine’s Instant Preview loads within one-tenth of a second on the average, but search engineers are working towards providing faster results with back-end smart coding and  distributed computing systems that give users around the world fast response times.

More than 1000 man-years have gone into creating the Google search algorithm, said the Google page.