How exactly does Google search work?

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When you search on Google, you don’t search on the web but on an index maintained by Google.
To understand the difference, perform the same search on Google and Bing – you will get different results.
It is like that detailed index at the end of a book.
Imagine you have a book on animals, and you want to search: “What do Pandas eat?”
You would look for Panda, Food, Panda Food, Animal Food etc. in the index.
You go to Panda – the index says Page 5, 10, and 15.
Panda Food says Page 5, 10, 16, 20-22, and 25.
You go to each of these pages, read some text and find that they are either referring to some other chapters, some other books or some other articles.
You go to other pages, which partially answer and partially direct you to other sources.
You read all of it, and you have the answer.
What you were doing here is called ‘spidering’ or web crawling in the world of digital search space.
To fetch the information you need, Google does the same thing more effectively.
When you search a term, the web spiders fetch a few pages; let us assume they fetch four.
Now each of these four pages, hypothetically, points to 3 links.
So the total pages Google has in sight are 4 (initial) + 12 (4 pages X 3 links) = 16.
Now imagine that this continues because each page has further links.
So, Google will suddenly have millions of pages about your search item.