Blame spell-check. Ten years ago this September, so the story goes, some Stanford grad students were helping Larry Page choose a name for his search engine. “Googolplex,” said Sean ­Anderson. (They’d already sensed how big this could ­become.) “Googol,” Page ­replied. ­Anderson, checking to see if the name was taken, typed ­g-o-o-g-l-e into his browser and made the most famous spelling mistake since p-o-t-a-t-o-e. Page registered the name within hours, and today, Google isn’t a typo, it’s a verb, one with a market cap of about $160 billion. Here, then, is a guide to what happens during a typical Google search—now, of course, with automatic spell-check.

1. Query Box: It all starts with somebody typing in a request for information about the safest dog food, what time the D.M.V. closes, or what the prime rate is in China.

2. Domain-Name Servers: “Hello, this is your operator . . . ” The software for Google’s domain-name servers runs on computers in leased or company-owned data centers all over the world, including one in the old Port Authority headquarters in Manhattan. Their sole purpose is to shepherd searches into one of Google’s clusters as efficiently as possible, taking into account which clusters are nearest to the searcher and which are least busy at that instant.

3. The Cluster: The request ­continues into one of at least 200 clusters, which sit in Google-owned data centers worldwide.

4. Google Web Server: This program splits a query among hundreds or thousands of machines so that they can all work on it at the same time. It’s the difference between doing your grocery shopping all by yourself and having 100 people simultaneously find one item and toss it into your cart.

5. Index Server: Everything Google knows is stored in a massive database. But rather than waiting for one computer to sift through those gigabytes of data, Google has hundreds of computers scan its “card catalog” at the same time to find every relevant entry. Popular searches are cached—held in memory—for a few hours rather than run all over again. That means you, Britney.

6. Document Server: After the index server compiles its results, the document server pulls all the relevant documents—the links and snippets of text from its massive database. How does Google search the Web so quickly? It doesn’t. It keeps three copies of all the information from the internet that it has indexed in its own document servers, and all those data have already been prepped and sorted.

7. Spelling Server: Google doesn’t read words; it looks for ­patterns of characters, be they in English or Sanskrit. If it sees your requested pattern a thousand times but finds a million hits for a similar pattern that’s off by one character, it connects the dots and politely suggests what you probably meant, even while it provides you the results, if any, for your fat-fingered query for “hwedge funds.”

8. Ad Server: Each query is simultaneously run through an ad database, and matches are fed to the Web server so that they’re placed on the results page. The ad team is in a race with the search team. Google vows to deliver all searches as quickly as possible; if ad results take longer to pull up than search results, they won’t make it onto the page—and Google won’t make money on that search.

9. Page Builder: The Google Web server collects the results of the thousands of operations it runs for a query, organizes all the data, and draws Google’s cunningly simple results page on your browser window, all in less time than it took to read this sentence.

10. Results ­Displayed: Often in 0.25 ­seconds or less.