Google Search Engine

Google Search Engine

WebDynamic™ Web Glossary

The largest search engine on the web, Google accounts for more than 40% of all web searches, and receives millions of search requests per day. Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising billions of web pages. Search results can be calculated in less than half a second.

It is free to have your website registered with Google, but whether or not it actually appears in searches is dependent upon a number of factors. A simple explanation of the way Google works is that a GoogleBot (spider, or computer program) crawls the web via hypertext links to find web sites and add them to its database.

The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank. This technique assigns an “importance” value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. It is estimated that Google rates all the web pages in its database against more than 200 ranking elements.

Two of the most important ranking elements are:

1. Keyword usage (presence in URLs, domain name, content/body text and html title tags), and
2. Link popularity (the number of internal and external links pointing to the target search page).