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Why is Google so Important?

Google is the number one search engine on the planet; everyone who uses the Internet, and even the rare ones who don’t, have heard the phrase ‘just Google it’ in their quest for up-to-date information about anything and everything.

In addition to being a search engine, Google has many other interests such as the famously popular YouTube in which anyone can be a video star, expressing their feelings through various songs, spoken word or the occasional paint by music video. Other Google offerings include Google Earth/Maps; Google Picasa for those who like to upload and publish their photos; Google Checkout for when shopping online and you find something you’d like to purchase, Google can help you purchase it; Google News and Gmail to name a few. Just recently, Google opened Google Buzz, its answer to the Twitter and Face Book crazy of updating your friends and chosen followers to your every move.

Google is not only important for everyday people looking up homemade recipes, homework help or the intermittent celebrity news articles; Google is important to the 150,000,000 active web sites on the Internet today (according to NetCraft, an Internet research firm).  In order to find the precise information a searcher wants, someone needs to shift through all these websites to find the helpful information. This is were Google’s algorithms comes into play. These complex algorithms are a mathematical set of instructions that ‘tell’ the computer how to complete a task, in this case, search for whatever it is an individual choose as their keyword, whether it was ‘ice skates,’ ‘Dalmatians’ or ‘highest money making film of all time.’

The Google algorithm assigns a webpage a rank based on several different aspects, including but not limited to how many times the keyword appears on the webpage. The higher the ranking, the higher up on the search engine results page (SERP) a website listing will be featured and most people are considered trusting and lazy and the combination will have them clicking on the first one or so links brought back by the search engine because they don’t want to ‘wade’ through a couple hundred pages of website listings to find their perfect match, they believe Google will do that for them by listing the prefect match as the one at the top of the list – this is not true. 

‘Spiders’ or ‘crawler’ scurry to each website and collect information from the links that pertain to the keywords, listing them in an index. The same keywords that were listed in the searchers query are gathered and then these webpages are listed using the special, complex, formula the algorithms use. These ‘autobots’ have some kind of special power because they can tell the difference between an actual webpage with good content and a redirect page which is only there to direct someone to a sale or some times spam.

The placement of the keywords is an important part of how Google locates a website. The Google ‘crawlers’ look for keywords throughout a webpage – many businesses use keyword rich or keyword density articles to drive the Google ‘autobots’ to their sites – but they mostly look in the titles (another reason for keyword rich articles) and headings. However, keyword dispersal is also key to the success of a website. Website creators should avoid over use of keywords although using them through out an article, at a density of approximately 4-5 percent is a good rule of thumb.