Having over 80 billion visits worldwide in March of this year alone, and sitting at the top of the most visited websites in Australia, what has Google done that other search engines have not? How has it surpassed all other search engines and become the most popular in the world? It certainly wasn’t by just mere chance or luck that Google reigns as the ruler of the search engine market.
‘What is the weather today?’, ‘Where is the closest market?’, ‘Who is the most successful musician in history?’ — we all respond to these inquiries with ‘Google it’ instead of ‘search it’, as Google’s sheer dominance has gone as far as for it to become synonymous with search engines. But in fact, there is more to Google’s ability to become and retain its status as the best search engine in the world than just winning the zero-sum game or by pure strategic brilliance.
From the Garage to Google HQ: A Brief History of Google
Google’s story traces back to 1995. Two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin partnered up to build a search engine. The ‘World Wide Web’ as we know it today was still in its incipience during this time, so the two students (working from their dorm rooms) built a search engine to index and determine webpages by importance and relevance. This search engine was called Backrub, only to be quickly renamed to Google, a play on the mathematical expression, ‘googol’, which refers to a number sequence of one followed by 100 zeros.
By 1998, the search engine had caught the eyes of the academic community and Silicon Valley venture capital investors alike. During this time, Page and Brin received a letter and a $100,000 cheque from Andy Bechtolsheim, the then-CEO of Sun Microsystems Co., and Google Inc. officially made its debut to the public. Under this investment, a new team was formed, and Google’s offices underwent a modest upgrade from the dorms to a garage in suburban California.
What originally started as a small space of a few clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and a bright blue carpet set in Menlo Park, California, would become one of the world’s largest corporate empires with a market capitalisation of more than $1.3 trillion USD and a line of more than 270 products and services to be used by developers, businesses, employees and virtually anyone from all backgrounds.
Staying Ahead of the Curve Through Innovation
The first and foremost thing Google does to stay ahead of the curve is through its constantly evolving algorithms and features that are specially tailored to the also ever-changing needs and preferences of users.
One of the most defining advantages of Google is its algorithms. They are routinely tweaked, with more than an average of 13 changes per day, which is equal to thousands of changes per year. In addition to this, Google uses key ranking factors such as meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context to determine what results to show to users and in what order — they are also constantly changing.
These make results more accurate and precise, which means users are getting relevant results and a greater search experience. Users can attain the answer they need immediately rather than scroll through an endless amount of pages that contain largely irrelevant information.
Having a Clear Company Direction
Compared to competitors such as Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, Google’s sole focus as a company has always been to build the best search engine — or as per their own mission statement, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
With an explicit purpose of creating a universal information search platform, Google clearly has an edge over aforementioned competitors such as Microsoft, which has Bing take a backseat behind greater priorities like Windows and Office, and Yahoo, which is more targeted towards the business and finance fields. Google has offered unparalleled access to a completely universal audience; whether local, national or international, any content can be discovered from all corners of the world.
Having this fundamental purpose in mind, Google now processes around 20 petabytes (around 20 million gigabytes) per day and is known to ‘crawl’ (through search bots referred to as spiders) more web pages than any other competitor.
Simplicity and Ease of Use
Sometimes doing less allows for more, and Google is an exemplification of this. Even today, many of Google’s competitors have cluttered user interfaces (UIs) with banner ads or other distractions. Contrastively, Google has a highly minimalistic interface.
It could even be said that Google’s success owes greatly to its precise ease of use and simplicity. Users spend less time trying to navigate distractions while spending more time on the core purpose of the platform. And obviously, having this customer-oriented mindset and user-friendly interface has won the hearts of users.
A Unique Advertisement Model
In fact, more than 80% of Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) revenue is from ads on Google, and this may seem surprising to some as Google does not have any explicit banner ads. However, this is a key aspect that differentiates this search engine from its competitors, as Google has adopted an advertisement strategy that is unique and distinctive. Its model is demonstrated in the Google Ads (originally called Google AdWords) digital marketing service.
Companies pay Google to display their advertisements in various forms. Unlike other platforms, Google Ads allows advertisers to reach their audiences through the Google Search Network, which allows these ads to be shown to users while they are searching for keywords, and the Google Display Network, which displays the ads to users who are actively searching for a particular product or services, putting them on the websites it thinks the target audience will visit, similar to traditional banner ads.
Both of these advertisement forms are unobtrusive and separate from the organic results a user might be trying to find when using the platform. The once-revolutionary idea that search engines need to make money from advertisements has been taken by Google to its greatest heights, and in a highly subtle way at that.
Google still stands as the superior engine precisely because of its unmatched algorithms, usability and business strategies. If you currently own a business, are a content creator, or simply trying to enhance your online search experience, leveraging the powerful search capabilities, features and vast network of tools of Google can significantly increase your visibility and accessibility in the digital world.
Images: Supplied
This is a sponsored article produced in partnership with Web Oracle
