“What happens after you press the button ‘Google Search’?”. People ask me this question often and here is a short version of what I found online in Google.com pages as, to be honest, I have no extra insight on this.
First it is important to undestand how Google approached the ‘problem’.
- (1) Developed the serving infrastructure
Search engines prior to Google’s ran off in a bunch of large servers that often got stuck or slowed terribly under peak loads. Google decided that instead of large servers it was important to have smaller and employed linked several PCs to quickly find each query’s answer. This allowed Google to build a cheaper and scalable infrastructure plus faster response times. Of course, the large majority of SE work this way nowadays.
- (2) breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.
The software behind the ‘search’ conducts several simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Again, Google went further in their SE concept. Traditional search engines relied heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses more than 200 signals, including the patented PageRank™ algorithm, “to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important”. After hypertext-matching analysis is conducted to determine witch pages are important based on the user query. This combination of PageRank e and query-specific relevance, Google ranks and displays the pages to the users.
The link provided previously has more info on PageRank Technology and Hypertext-Matching Analysis. I personally like the also the information on PageRank available here.
See below the Life of a Google Query in one image and less than 0.5 seconds 
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