Search Engines – Google

Google is the most dominant search engine today, with over 90% share of the market. If you’re planning on making an impact on the internet, a thorough understanding of how Google works is absolutely essential.

Google’s market dominance is due to the accuracy of its algorithm. Image courtesy of Pixabay

Anatomy of Google

To enable Google to deliver fast, accurate and relevant results, Google must first learn about the majority of the almost 1.7 billion websites available on the internet, and thereafter, organise and classify them.

To do this, Google periodically sends spiders and web crawlers, sometimes referred to as Googlebots, bots or robots, to go to a website, analyse its content and structure, download a cached copy, and follow the outbound links from the site. This process will enable Google to continuously enlarge its search database and maintain its accuracy.

Following this, Google uses its proprietary algorithm to read through the data in its search database. Using its reported 200 ranking signals, Google will then classify and rank these websites. Popular signals include keywords and backlinks.

Serving search results

Google takes just a fraction of a second to serve its search results. They could serve it even faster (not that you’ll notice) if they didn’t stop first to fetch relevant Google Ads from their advertisers. However, search results served are not uniform. They actually vary depending on location, date, and device. In addition, a user’s browsing history and previous searches can also affect search results. You can view the difference by running the same search query using the incognito mode on your browser or by using a VPN.

However, what cannot be denied is, Google’s search results are extremely accurate and relevant. Even Bing, despite the billions poured into research by Microsoft, cannot come near to the accuracy of Google’s search results.

Who can help me when it comes to Google and their search engine?

Whilst Google is infamously quite when it comes to exactly how to rank a website, they do give hints and clues every now and then. Above all else they want webmasters to create the highest quality sites as possible and leave the ranking of them in their hands. Having said that, it is always good to be proactive. The best way to start improving your position in Google is to seek the expertise and SEO services of a qualified SEO company.