{"id":7842,"date":"2017-09-26T21:39:45","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T20:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.verveuk.eu\/?post_type=post&p=7842"},"modified":"2022-10-19T16:57:54","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T15:57:54","slug":"beginners-guide-to-google-search-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verve-design.co.uk\/beginners-guide-to-google-search-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginners Guide To The Google Search Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a Digital Marketing Manager, I am not often asked the question what is Google? But I have lost count of a number of times I am asked how does Google work? A large proportion of the earth’s population who have internet access will know what Google is, however, the question should be \u2018who\u2019 are Google? The fact many people say \u2018what\u2019 instead of \u2018who\u2019 is testament to the enormous growth this company has undertaken over the years. So much so that the brand, Google, has now become a verb for almost all internet surfers – To search on the internet is now \u2018To Google\u2019. Google can nowadays be considered to be 3 things. 1) A Company. 2) A Brand. 3) A Search Engine.<\/p>\n

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What\/Who are Google?<\/h2>\n

Back in 1995, Stanford university student Sergey Brin met his future business partner Larry Page when assigned the task to show Larry around the campus. Little did the two know that this first chance meeting was to be the very start of an extraordinary journey together. At first, the pair didn\u2019t seem to agree on much, but over time the two struck up a partnership. One thing they did agree on was that there was a problem with how resources on the world wide web were sorted and ordered and set out to build a better search engine experience to offer a more enjoyable, useful and faster user experience. Initially, the company was set up under the name Backrub but was soon renamed Google. The term Google is a mathematical term to express \u20181\u2019 followed by 100 \u20180\u2019s\u2019. The term aptly reflected the pair’s mission to organise resources within the world wide web.
\nToday, Google is much more than a provider of the world’s largest search engine, however, for the purposes of this article, we will be focusing our attention here.<\/p>\n

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What Is A Search Engine?<\/h2>\n

A search engine indexes web pages within the world wide web that are submitted to its index.<\/p>\n

Definition of Index.\u00a0<\/span>In the world of search engines, in particular, Google, the index is the database where all the information Google retrieves from when it crawls a website is stored. Indexing is the process of collecting, parsing, and storing the data.<\/em><\/p>\n

Instead of shelving books like a library would do, a search engine takes the individual pages from websites and indexes. This means it returns individual pages within its search results as opposed to the whole website. This provides a more granular result. There are, generally speaking, two ways in which a website can become indexed by a search engine. The first is for the website to be manually submitted to the search engine and the second, is for a website already within the search engines index to link to it.<\/p>\n

Definition of A link.<\/span> The term has been shortened from <\/em>hyperlink. A hyperlink is a way of connecting an image or text <\/em>within one web page to another web page. Hyperlinks can be recognised within a page. When a link is<\/em>\u00a0hovered over the browsers mouse pointer turns to a pointing finger.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Face Of The Google Search Engine<\/h3>\n

The front end of a search engine has changed dramatically over the years, however, Google has worked hard over the years at simplifying the search process a user takes when looking for information and the way in which it presents results of information that assist in answering the searcher’s query. The front end of the Google search engine consists of two page templates. The first is the initial search page where you enter your search query. Generally speaking, this page contains the Google logo and a search box for you to enter the text of your search query along with a button that once clicks initiates the search.Asides from this you may find the odd text link but generally speaking Google aims to keep this page as minimalist as possible. The second page template you will see is the search engine results page (often referred to as a SERP or the SERPS.)<\/p>\n

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The Anatomy Of A Google Search Results Page<\/h3>\n

The Google search results page lists the results Google believes provide the information the searcher is looking for based on the search query they have entered. There are two types of results provided, organic search results and paid ads. Organic search results look similar to paid ads (through the Google Adwords advertising program) however paid ads are distinguishable by an ad symbol with slight alterations to formatting and character limits. Organic search results can appear in a few different formats, to date these appear as;<\/p>\n

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  • Default organic result<\/li>\n
  • Social listing<\/li>\n
  • News listing<\/li>\n
  • Image listing<\/li>\n
  • Video listing<\/li>\n
  • Local pack listing<\/li>\n
  • App listings<\/li>\n
  • Rich snippet\/rich answer listings<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

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    Default organic search listing example<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"google<\/p>\n

    Paid ads appear in the Google search results through the following formats;<\/p>\n

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      \n
    • Default Google Adwords text ad result<\/li>\n
    • Google Adwords Shopping result<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

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      Google Adwords paid ads examples (text ads & shopping ads)<\/span><\/p>\n

      \"google<\/p>\n

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      Google returns the results of your search query in less than 1 second. Google has to search its database of data that stores all of the data from its most recent crawl of websites (which is huge, like trillions of web pages huge), organise the data in a results fashion, rank the results based on what it thinks is the most relevant answer first and then display these results (and it could be returning millions of results). This is lightning fast speed! There are also other processes that it must take before returning results such as personalisation. Google will attempt to personalise your results to additionally increase the relevancy of your results such as returning local results for location-based search queries.<\/p>\n

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      How Does The Google Search Engine Work?<\/h2>\n

      As search engines have changed over the years, it is now easier to talk about what the Google search engine is, and what it\u2019s objectives are.<\/p>\n

      The Google search engine has two main functions, 1) collect data from web pages and sort web page data in an organised fashion within an index. 2) Using a complex algorithm to return the most relevant results from this index to a user based on content of their search query. The most relevant results show at the top of the search engine results page.<\/p>\n

      So the first job of the search engine is to collect the data. To do this, it uses search engine spiders, also known as bots, search bots or crawlers. The search engine spider is a program that finds web pages within an index or indexes connected by a network or networks. These search bots collect data from the search engines database of indexed pages. Google then uses this data to form a listing of results in reaction to a user’s Google search. The crawling bots are programmed to look in certain areas of a web page codes for certain data and will navigate through pages of a website through hyperlinks. Google decides what information the crawling bots look for which is decided by the ranking factors of its large algorithm.<\/p>\n

      Definition of an Algorithm.<\/span> An algorithm by definition is a set of steps that need to be followed in a particular order in order to achieve a particular objective. A very simple algorithm could be a set of steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the desired cake. If the steps were not taken in a particular order the cake would not look and taste how it was intended. A search engine algorithm is a list of steps that a search engine crawling bot must take in order to retrieve certain data from a web page. Google\u2019s algorithm can be dissected and a detailed explanation of Google\u2019s algorithm can be found in the next section of this article.<\/em><\/p>\n

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