What Happens Whenever You Type google.com On Your Browser And Hit Enter.

This topic is a classic and still widely used interview question for many types of software engineering position. It is used to assess a candidate’s general knowledge of how the web stack works on top of the internet. Many software engineering candidates struggle with this concept. So if you're one here is the right article for you as I will be covering both frontend and backend (end-end) perspective which comprises ;

• DNS request
• TCP/IP
• Firewall
• HTTPS/SSL
• Load-balancer
• Web server
• Application server
• Database

In this article, we’ll look at what happens whenever you type a URL (in this case google.com) into your browser and hit enter. End to end, the process involves the browser, your computer’s operating system, your internet service provider, the server where you host the site, and services running on that server.

Every day you open up your browser and navigate to your favorite websites — whether it be social media, news, or e-commerce sites. You go to this page by typing in a url or clicking on a link to the page. Have you ever thought about what happens behind the scenes? How does the news get to you when you press enter after typing in the URL? How did the images on this post show up in your browser? How does your Facebook feed and the post data show up in your browser securely?. Firstly, we should take note that websites are collections of files, often HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images, that tell your browser how to display the site, images, and data .Whenever you type google.com and hit enter, the following process takes place;

1. DNS request: The domain name system, or DNS, is like the Contacts app on our phone, we store contacts with specific names so we can easily locate it each time we need it. DNS helps our browser (and us) find servers on the Internet. We can do a DNS lookup to find the IP address of the server based on the domain name, eg google.com Your browser sends a request to the DNS server to resolve the domain name google.com into an IP address . NOTE: https = scheme, google.com = domain name.
2. TCP/IP: stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. An IP address is a string of numbers separated by periods, they are expressed as a set of four numbers — an example address might be 192.158.1.38. Each number in the set can range from 0 to 255. Learn more about IP adress.Once the IP address is obtained, your browser establishes a TCP/IP connection with the web server at that IP address.
3. Firewall: The firewall checks if the incoming traffic is legitimate and allows it to pass through if it is.
4. HTTPS/SSL: If the website uses HTTPS/SSL (which Google does), your browser and the web server establish a secure connection using SSL/TLS encryption.
5. Load-balancer: If there are multiple web servers behind a load balancer, the load balancer distributes incoming traffic across them to ensure that no single server is overloaded.
6. Web server: The web server receives your request and sends back an HTML page containing the Google search page.
7. Application server: The application server processes your search query and sends back search results to the web server.
8. Database: The database stores all of Google’s indexed pages and returns relevant search results to the application server.

In Conclusion: In our modern age where everything is online, it's amazing to know what happens each you're online, each time you click something. Yet, it is done so fast that very few would even begin to fathom the amazing process that takes place.

Hope this helped? Follow my handle for more articles like this. You can also follow me on twitter Moses Ezekiel where I share programming tips, thank you. for reading my article.