There are more than 2 trillion searches travelling through Google per year. With over 77% of the global search market share, Google is the undisputed king of the search engines.
Search Engine Market ShareGoogle – 77.43 % |
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History
Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, in California. Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
While early search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, Larry and Sergey wanted a system that analyzed the relationships and relevance among websites and content. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined the information’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages. This focused on quality of content over just quantity.
What does Google mean?
The name Google originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", which is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros (1x10100). This word was crafted to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
How does Google offer so much information?
While at one time you might have visited a library and asked the librarian for information, today’s “librarians” on the internet are the search engines. Google is pulling bits of information from all the available pages that it can access and scan or "crawl".
- Corporate pages
- Product pages
- Lifestyle articles
- Facebook posts
- Tweets
- Pinterest pins
- LinkedIn pages
- Blogs
- Etc
All of it is being evaluated to see if it is relevant to the user’s keywords and delivered to answer questions.