Website Ranking and how they earn... (google.com)

Member Name: chocomint

Product:	google.com
Date:	20/10/08 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use and very relevant search results

Disadvantages: Nothing that I can particularly put my finger on.

Over the recent past Google has established itself from being one of the search engines out on the internet to THE LEADING search engine used by most internet users today. This review touches base on a couple of points that you might have not been aware of and may be useful to you in your searches as well as if you have a web-site that you would like to get more hits on.

***Why it is so popular***

There are a few key factors that have lead to its rise to stardom.
1. Relevancy of search results: The result of a search is obviously the most important factor for someone searching for something, and the Google search algorithms have proven to be the best out of the lot providing a well ranked listing of relevant results.
2. Simplicity of use: The google.com home page contains not much more than the text-entry area used to enter the search string. It is simple, clear and uncluttered with no advertising or other distracting material.
3. Features aplenty: From the home page features of searching from images, locations/driving directions (from Google maps) and shopping information to other more advanced searches such as the Patent Search provide users with the ability to easily search for anything they desire!

***Organization of Search Results***

When you search on google.com, the results can be seen in three distinct areas on each result page
1 & 2. Sponsored Links: You will see this area right at the top, with a shaded background color and also towards the right side of the search results. These are links put in by paid sponsors for their products/services. For example, if you search for "Shoes", a retail store such as Macys.com may have paid Google to show their link for a shoe sale in the sponsored links section. However, there is no guarantee that Macys.com will appear right at the top or even in the top five results as there could be many vendors bidding for the same key word "Shoes". You can look up Google AdWords (adwords.google.com) to learn more about sponsored links, or if you have a website of your own that you would like to sponsor with google.com.
3. General search results: This is the third section, which appears below the sponsored links at the top of the page. The results here are ranked according to the relevance and popularity of the link. This is determined using Google algorithms that use information such as the relevancy of the search string to "Tags" on web-pages and also how frequently others have visited a particular web page from a particular search phrase/word. Google uses a concept called "spiders" (or robots) that crawl web-sites from time to time to gather information on words and phrases that are most relevant to web-pages, to be shown when users search on those terms. If you have web-site and you want it to be ranked high in Google you can use "Search Engine Optimization" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimi zation) techniques to help it get high rankings on words/phrases most relevant to the content on your site.

***How they make their money***

Note that Paid Advertising (Sponsored Links) and Search Engine Optimization are common concepts not only for Google but for most other Search Engines as well. Sponsored Links are one of the biggest revenue bringers to search engines such as Google.com and has been stated as being one of the main reasons Google's 2008 3rd quarter profits have been huge, despite the US economic down-turn. Pay-per-clicks is the main way in which Google receives payments from sponsors where a payment needs to be made only when someone clicks on a particular sponsored link. There are other payments methods as well though. You can find out more about these as well through a Google search :-)

Summary: How websites get ranked on google.com