Google in Nontechnical Terms
Learning Web 2.0 can be an overwhelming and time consuming task. There are so many different aspects of it from the social media sites to websites to blogging. I have been working on it for over a year – the hardest concept I have had to learn yet is understanding Google and how to get found on that amazing site.
I am not bashing Google – in fact, I am fascinated and amazed to think that there are people in this world that are brilliant enough to come up with the idea. Had world advancement been dependent on someone like me, we might still be rolling boulders away from the cave door and rubbing sticks together to get our fires going.
Recently, I have finally started to get a much better comprehension of how Google actually works. Not algorithms or the real technical ins and outs – but the overall basics. Hopefully this blog will help you understand it a lot faster than I did.
What exactly is Google?
As most of you likely already know is: Google is a search engine. People log onto the internet, go to Google (or one of the other search engines) and find whatever information they are looking for. Since well over 70% of all web traffic uses Google, this is the search engine you will want to show up on.
Google is in business to make money. It obviously doesn’t make money from any of us going into the site, typing a phrase in the search box and getting the information we want. So how does the site make money?
Google actually makes its money from people or businesses that pay to advertise. So, next time you go into Google look at the initial page you land on. Over to the right hand side of the page you will see a list of results that are what is known as "Pay-Per-Click" (PPC) advertising - every time someone clicks on one of those links, the advertiser pays Google a predetermined amount.
Google’s main purpose is to not only keep those advertisers happy but to get more paying clients. Therefore, it wants to make the results of any searches relevant to what people are looking for. Otherwise, why would people keep going back to do searches on Google if they weren’t finding the information they want?
So how does Google list things?
Let’s go back to the search results for a minute. If you look on the left hand side of that same page of search results, the listed links are what is know as organic results. These organic results are not paid advertising – Google is listing that material for free. So how does Google decide what material should appear there and in what order? Remember there is a huge amount of material out on the internet.
On a regular basis Google sends out "spiders" (not the nasty live things that spin webs) out on the web to look for and store information in its index (think of an index as a large catalog like you would find in a bookstore or a library). The indexed material is then stored on large servers all over the world. When someone is doing a search, Google’s software actually goes out to the servers and looks for information that is considered to be the most relevant to that particular search.
In future blog posts, I will break down some of the different criteria that Google looks for when trying to decide what sites are the most relevant – such thing as SEO, keywords, backlinks and all the other things that make up helping someone be found in this world of Web 2.0 and beyond.
