Google is biggest search engine available right now with the most accurate results. 70+ percent of queries are fired on goggles compare to other search engines available like Bing and Yandex. After the revolution of internet and Smartphone, people started searching everything on Google. You can literally Google everything you want to know about and in most of the cases, it will return some results with website references for your query.
Have you ever wondered how Google show these results almost instantly from all around the world? The accuracy and speed of results make it apart from other search engines.
Let me explain how exactly Google search works and how it shows you the near-to-best results each time when you search anything.
Let’s start with the basics.
To show the website results in user’s query, first of all, Google will need to know about all the pages and website that is live on the internet. Therefore, basically, Google make a full list of available websites on the internet and update it constantly. When the user performs any query, suppose “dog food”, Google will find all the available web pages that are related to the “dog food”, sort it from the best result to the least suitable and display it to user’s screen.
In the first step, where Google needs to make a list of available websites on the internet, they use Google bots named crawlers or spiders. these spiders are a piece of code programs, that go from one website to another, crawl all the data on that page (text, media, links, etc) and insert an entry to the Google’s database. (Consider a huge notebook with millions of pages).
Crawlers crawl all the accessible links from the internet and create a huge database with keywords and other content information stored in the Google’s servers.
To include newly generated pages and websites, crawler performs this task – crawling frequently and keep the data updated. After that, Google ads the webpage to the Google search as per the quality of page for ranking on the user’s query. This is called indexing of page. Means, your page is now ready to be considered to rank on user’s queries.
So, We have millions of website’s data. Now what?
The next task of Google is to display the data to users, right. But, wait,
When people search any query like “dog food” there will be thousands of pages related to “dog food” in the Google’s database.
Thousands of results you can see for the keyword “dog food” found in the Google. But it is not possible to show this all results directly in the list to users. It is meaningless. So the very next task for Google is to sort the available pages in the order from best match to least matching results. And display the best 10 results on the first page that are related to the user’s query.
How Google determine which 10 sites to display on the first page?
This is the biggest point that determines the quality of any search engine. The only aim of any search engine is to find relevant information and resources to users from the internet based on user’s query.
Google has its unique (secret) algorithm that sort all the results and display the best links on the first page and so on. it is known as a hummingbird, which powers the core Google search. Google’s ranking algorithm uses 200+ different factors to evaluate the website’s value for a particular search query and based on that, it ranks the pages in Google search results.
Till 2010, there was a term known as page rank. Google was counting each website’s page rank using these 200+ parameters and based on the page rank, it was ranking the web pages. But, lately, Google announced that they stopped counting the page rank and now it has some secret parameters to evaluate the website’s authority and eligibility of website content.
Why is first-page ranking beneficial for any businesses?
It is the common human behavior that people searching on the Google, clicks on first, second or third results mostly for any query they are looking for. And rarely go to the second or third page for searching something. It means, all the organic traffic (people who search and land to any site from different search engine instead of any other reference is known as organic traffic) is divided into websites ranking on the first page, and the top rankers get a bigger piece of the pie.
If your business is ranking first for some search term, you will not need to spend money to drive traffic from ads and you will get free qualified traffic from search engine directly. This makes sense when the PPC ads cost a big amount in the competitive world.
How to rank on the first page?
The process of ranking web pages in a search engine is known as Search engine optimization. if you are new to the business and want a long-term strategy, I suggest you contact SEO consultant or agency that will help you drive steady strategic traffic growth. You can learn SEO by yourself also, but it will take lots of time and efforts.
Hope this article help you understand the basics of search engine Google and its working.