Google's search engine works through a process of crawling websites to index their content, then ranking the indexed pages based on relevance to return the most pertinent results when a user searches. It starts by having Googlebot crawl and index new or updated pages, then analyzes content to understand what each page is about and stores this in its massive database. When a user searches, Google's index machines return results deemed most relevant based on many factors, providing search results in nanoseconds.