Google has launched a new animated website called "How Search Works." It's an interactive scrolling graphic that shows what goes on behind the scenes everytime someone types a query into Google Search, broken into three distinct sections: one on Google's massive web-crawling and indexing operation (covering 30 trillion pages), another on its alogrithms and ranking strategy, and a final section on how it fights and removes spam.

The final section includes live, updating screenshots of webpages Google has recently de-indexed from its listings because they fit its criteria for spam — such as scraping content from other websites and generating "gibberish" text. Google also released a new graph showing how much spam it has detected and removed since 2004, with "pure spam" removals peaking in mid-2011 at 553,994 webpages. The new site comes after other recent efforts by Google to explain and promote its products, such as the "Inside Search" site launched in 2011 and the "More Than A Map" site launched for Google Maps last year. Check out the full site for these and other interesting bits of Google search trivia.