Google Search Engine
History
Google started out its life as nothing more than a research project in January 1996. Two PhD students from Stanford University, California named Larry Page and Sergey Brin hypothesised that a search engine that was capable of analyzing the relationships between websites would be able to yield better results. Initially this search engine was nicknamed “backrub” because of the unique way in which the system checked backlinks to relevant pages, however this was changed to Google as a misspelling of the word “googlol”.
The search engine itself was initially hosted as a sub domain of the university “google.stanford.edu” and was only removed from this domain once the company was founded in September 1997. Once Google Inc had been registered the search engine moved to its own, well known domain “google.com”.
Since then Google has developed a large user base amongst the ever growing number of internet users across the globe. This is mainly down to two main factors. Firstly its simplicity of design and ease of use, secondly its ability to generate relevant information for the end user. In 2000 Google expanded its organic search engine index and started to include a PPC (Pay Per Click) search engine service known as Google Adwords.
Google has a complex search engine algorithm that it uses to establish its search engine listings. This algorithm is considered the holy grail of SEO and is one of the most closely guarded secrets on the World Wide Web. A few elements of this algorithm have been released to the general public through patents filed by goggle over the years and have helped many web promotion companies such as Orbit develop search engine results for its clients.
Advanced Search Operators
Google’s search facilities are not limited to reporting relevant information for a users search query. There are a range of advanced search operators that you can use to carry out more sophisticated searches upon the current Google Index. A few such queries are listed below:
• link: <URL> - returns the pages linking to the specified URL.
• site: <URL> - restricts the returned hits to a specific website
• define: <query> - returns Google glossary definition for the query term
• info: <URL> - returns information about the queried site.
• filetype: <filetype> - restrict the results of the search to a particular filetype extension e.g. doc, txt
• related: <URL> - returns similar / related websites
A full listing of Googles advanced search engine operators can be found here
Page Rank
PageRank is the most well known part of the Google algorithm. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. However contrary to popular belief, this is not the most important factor within the Google search engine ranking system. It can however provide valuable information on how “popular” a website is throughout Googles current web index.
Sandbox Effect
The google sandbox effect has been noted by many webmasters since 2004. The theory of the Google Sandbox Effect states that:
“Websites with newly-registered domains or domains with frequent ownership or nameserver changes are placed in a sandbox in the indexes of Google until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.”
It appears that this effect is limited to the domain name only and not to individual pages. The websites that have been observed to be in this theoretical sandbox will however rank for more obscure and less competitive related keywords and phrases.
The Google Sandbox theory has been a long standing debate amongst search engine optimisation specialists and web masters for many years as there has been no conformation from Google that such a filter exists.
Google Dance
The Google dance is a very well known part of Googles indexing update. For years SEO’s and Webmasters have seen there sites “shuffle” around the search engine listings. These updates were executed on average every 3 months or so and because of the devastation caused and significant loss of traffic attributed to the updates they were named much like tropical storms. In 2006 google had a overhall of its main indexing system that was nicknamed "bigdaddy". The big daddy update removed the 3 month periodical shuffle of web results into an almost continual flux.
Supplemental Index
Google contains a secondary database containing pages of less importance (according to its own algorithm). URL’s that are placed within this index are very rarely shown for key search phrases and as such become worthless to search engine optimisation specialists and webmasters for driving traffic to there website.
There are many reasons a page can find its way into Googles supplemental index. A few of which are listed below:
• Duplicate content.
• Low PageRank.
• Lack of trust with Google.
• High page count within the site.
• Page freshness
With extensive SEO (search engine optimisation) work these issues can usually be resolved fairly quickly. Orbits web promotion specialists have been able to develop methods of removing pages from the supplemental index and using them to generate traffic for targeted phrases.
Other Google Services
Google offers many services to help webmasters correct errors and ensure there sites end up within the main index. Orbit understands that these services can prove invaluable in the success of any Web Promotion campaign no matter what the target market may be. To read more about these services please click on the below links.
Google Adwords
Google Sitemaps
Google Analytics
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