How Does Google Work?

Google has created a huge database about the content that is available on other web pages. When you type in a query, Google's computers search that database to find the websites that answer your search terms.

How does Google know which websites are best?

Ahh, the holy grail of web search. The answer is that it is all handled by Google's algorithm, or a computer program that looks at more than 50 different factors about each and every website it knows about, and ranks them in terms of how well they relate to the words included in your search.

Many people spend their lives trying to reverse engineer, or figure out how Google functions. Some of the main factors these researchers report are:

1. Site Content (What the site talks about.)
   
   
2. Page Rank
   
   
3. Inbound Links (Which sites link to this site, and what do those sites say about this site?)
   
   
4. When the content last changed
   
   
5. Site Age
   
   
6. Site Owner
   
   
7. etc.

To complicate matters, Google is periodically revising their system.

What is PageRank?

Page Rank is a measure of the authority of each webpage on the Internet, as measured by the links going to and from each webpage.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote about the technique in their paper, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

Each link, pointing from one page to another can be considered a vote for that page. But PageRank is not simply a measurement of which web pages have the most links pointing to it, but rather includes additional factors like the subject of each page and PageRank or authority of the site doing the linking. In other words, the links from important pages that are on the same topic as the destination pages count far more than links from unimportant new web pages on a different subject.

What is a Google Bomb?

The link text pointing to a certain page are so important in Google's algorithm that it was possible for a page to appear in the search results even if it did not apply to the term.

Not sure the question?

We have heard that about 50 percent of all searches are unique.

What happened when Sergey Brin and Larry Page initially approached Yahoo?

In 1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page approached Yahoo to sell or license their algorithm. The answer was, "No," but the story varies between telling them to "Go back to their school project" to "Who's looking for a better search engine? People don't care."

What does the name Google stand for?

It's a play on the mathematical term googol, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Interesting factoid

Initially Google was called BackRub.

How does Google make money? Adsense and Adwords

Google "gives away" a great search engine, among other features. That's great. But how do they pay for it? What is Google's business model?

In a nutshell: advertising revenue, both on Google's site and on other sites.

Google is a major player in the online advertising industry. Every time you search Google, you'll see ads displayed along with your results. Those ads are never "mixed in" with the results - there is no "pay to play" on Google... which is one of the reasons Google became the most popular search engine in the first place. But the sponsored text-link ads above and to the right of the results generate a great deal of money for Google. These ads are known as "Google Adwords." Those who wish to advertise via Google can learn more on the Google Adwords page.

In addition, you may have noticed columns or boxes containing similar text-link ads on other web sites - such as this one - which say "Ads by Google" at the bottom. Google already had a powerful system for selling and displaying ads in association with their own search engine. From there, it wasn't much of a jump to start displaying ads on other web sites. Webmasters of popular sites with interesting content can sign up on the Google Adsense page and begin displaying Google ads to their users. Google pays the webmaster a portion of the advertising revenue and keeps the rest.