If you are one of those people who are always online, then you probably turn to Google every time you have a question. No matter how silly it may be, Google always seems to have an answer. This is probably what most people now use the term “Google” as a verb meaning search. You will often people say, “Google it”. It is by far the most popular search engine.

Other than search, Google also has other products including Google+ (a social networking site), Google Docs, Google Drive among many others. With all this products and services, one can’t help but wonder where Google stores all their data.

Apparently, Google has servers in the thousands and each has a specially designated purpose. Here are some of the serves and their designated tasks.

Google Backup Images – Some of the serves that backup Google information

• Web servers:
  These are the ones that have the responsibility of handling all queries entered on Google Search. When you enter a query, the web server will interact with e.g. ad, spelling, index etc and then give you results in HTML.
• Data gathering server:
  These organize and collect info for Google. They crawl or “spider” the internet through Googlebot in search of existing and newly added content. These servers index content update that index and also rank pages based on algorithms by Google search.
• Index servers:
  This is where most of the “magic” happens. These servers are the ones that return all documented ID’s corresponding with your queries.
• Document servers:
  These are the ones that store web page content’s document version. Each file contains files that have been stored in PF files, JPEG files and more. All these are stored in the different servers depending on the information category. Document servers give users snippets of data based on the search query. Since there are many index documents coming by the day, these servers use much more space than others.
• Ad servers:
  These servers are very important to both businesses and Google. It is a major source of revenue for Google and is also source of livelihood to many businesses worldwide. They manage Ads integral to Google AdSense and AdWords services. Ad servers and web servers interact with each other and determine the ads that are appropr to aniate for different queries.