What happens when you Google something?

^{Photo credit: Olivia Huynh}

What happens when...

According to Alex Gaynor--who has made many substantial contributions to Django, PyPy, CPython, PyCA Cryptography, and other projects--et al. (2015), these are the 24 things that happen after someone googles something. It's quite an elaborate process, but very intriguing. Click here to read more...

...you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?

• The "g" key is pressed
• The "enter" key bottoms out
• Interrupt fires [NOT for USB keyboards]
• (On Windows) A WM_KEYDOWN message is sent to the app
• (On OS X) A KeyDown NSEvent is sent to the app
• (On GNU/Linux) the Xorg server listens for keycodes
• Parse URL
• Is it a URL or a search term?
• Check HSTS list
• Convert non-ASCII Unicode characters in hostname
• DNS lookup
• ARP process
• Opening of a socket
• TLS handshake
• HTTP protocol
• HTTP Server Request Handle
• Behind the scenes of the Browser
• Browser
• HTML parsing
• CSS interpretation
• Page Rendering
• GPU Rendering
• Window Server
• Post-rendering and user-induced execution