Why we love Google

Search engines in general, and Google in particular, have one primary purpose: to enable the worldwide audience of the Web to find the information they need. While directories are large repositories of information indexed and categorized, search engines go beyond indexing to intelligently providing a user the best possible information that would serve their particular search need.

This is why search engines are infinitely more powerful than directories: they save time and effort. You type in a word and the answer comes up instantly. This comes at a price, however. The search engines must collect maintain extensive metadata about various websites and corresponding queries and keywords.

Effective website ranking is also crucial to a search engine’s performance. If they wouldn’t return relevant results immediately, in practice on the first immediately viewable page(though this could change with AJAX and other rich media interfaces), what different would a search engine be from a directory? Both would require extensive browsing. Hence the need of the ranked hierarchy of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Google is the world’s most widely used search engine. Although people in at least two major countries, China and Russia, prefer to use other search engines that are more popular there than Google, the vast majority of the English speaking world, including the UK, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh use Google as their primary search engine. Google also supports other languages such as Arabic, and virtually all the European languages. India and Pakistan boast a variety of regional languages, and Google has support for almost all major ones. A user in India, for example, would be as at ease searching in Tamil as he would be searching in English.

Google created a niche for itself by making use of incoming hyperlinks, or backlinks as they are often referred to, for assigning weightage to webpages. This is called PageRank. What people don’t know, however, is that Google uses more than hyperlinks to calculate the relative importance of a web page. Google utilizes a plethora of services, including intelligent software systems and human web page reviewers, to contribute toward an accurate understanding of web pages’ inherent value to the user, generating a truly relevant search engine index that concentrates more on the end user above anything else.

The value that Google provides to the online search experience is truly unparalleled. The most relevant results are returned early in the SERP, and Google has been very successful at creating a largely accurate hierarchy of web-pages, giving rise to relative or contextual relevance. Determining what is relevant, and where, is now the job of the search engine, a task that Google is living up to nicely. These are only some of the reasons the world loves Google. As the Internet becomes the most extensive, widely used library, repository and knowledge base, search engines will become the key to unlocking this valuable resource.