Google Search

What is Google Search?

Google Search, commonly referred to as Google Web Search or just Google, is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. It is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, handling more than three billion daily searches. The order of search on Google’s search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank called “PageRank.” Success in organic search relies much on implementing effective SEO strategies.

Google Search provides many different options for customized search, using Boolean operators such as exclusion (“-xx”), alternatives (“xx OR yy OR ZZ”), and wildcards (“Winston * Churchill” returns “Winston Churchill,” “Winston Spencer Churchill,” etc.)

According to Wikipedia, “Google Search is a search engine provided and operated by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is the most-visited website in the world. Additionally, it is the most searched and used search engine in the entire world.”

It tells us the following about Google Search:

According to Google, “Google Search is a fully-automated search engine that uses software known as web crawlers that explore the web regularly to find pages to add to our index.” Its guide talks about how pages get in their index. That typically starts with being found naturally, which advanced SEO schema strategies accomplish, they are then added automatically when its web crawlers explore the web.

Introducing the three stages of Google Search

Google Search works in three stages, and not all pages make it through each stage:

Crawling: Google downloads text, images, and videos
from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers.
Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and
video files on the page, and stores the information in the Google index, which is a large
database.
Serving search results: When a user searches on
Google, Google returns information that’s relevant to the user’s query.

At first blush, that may sound simple – but it isn’t! The tech giant is always improving its algorithms and attempt to change for the better. We find it is very important to be appriased of any updates to Google’s Helpful Content System.

The same and other options can be specified in a different way on an Advanced Search page. The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers, as opposed to other data, such as images or data contained in databases. It was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.

Google Search Includes Much More Than Searching for Words

Google Search provides several features beyond searching for words. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for numbers, dates, and some specific forms, including ranges, prices, temperatures, money and measurement unit conversions, calculations, package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation. In June 2011 Google introduced “Google Voice Search” to search for a spoken, rather than typed, word. In May 2012 Google introduced a Knowledge Graph semantic search feature in the U.S. Analysis of the frequency of search terms may indicate economic, social and health trends.

Often Digital Marketers Look for Google Search Trends

Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google have been shown to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels, and provide the information faster than traditional reporting methods and surveys. As of July 2023, the most searched entities on Google are “YouTube” and “Amazon”. The next most popular keywords are “Facebook”, “Google”, “Wordle”, “Gmail”, “whatsapp web”, and “chat gpt”. Before moving on to our list of top global searches, it’s worth describing what “search volume” means.

The search volume represents the number or percentage of search queries for a specific search term in a search engine such as Google within a specified timeframe. The number of search queries is estimated and can be subject to seasonal, regional and thematic fluctuations.

The total number of Google searches conducted daily in 2023 as of mid July is 8.5 billion searches. Can you image – Google processes over 8.5 billion searches per day – for FREE? The Google Lens, mostly used for image search, is used 8 billion times a month.

When we think of Google Search’s competitors, Bing and DuckDuckGo come first to mind. However, competition is getting stiffer and also includes Baidu and Soso.com in China; Naver.com and Daum Communications in South Korea; Yandex in Russia; Seznam.cz in the Czech Republic; Yahoo! in Japan, Taiwan and the United States. Some smaller search engines offer facilities not available with Google, e.g. not storing any tracking information.

How google Search is Changing in 2024

A 2024 algorithm update kicked the year off admist rapid changing SERPS. Like other Google’s updates, its purpose is to further refine the search engine’s ability to understand user intent and deliver the most relevant results. With many serarchers satisfied with their answer right on the SERP, conversation optimization specialists face new challenges. As well, poeople can now folow their favorite authors if they are using Chrome’s new follow feed feature.

Google SERPs now display more content by topic. Meaning, if you know what topics are of most interest to your readers, you can show up more often in Top Stories and News Boxes. We also see a transition where schema markup needs to more closely align with Google Merchant Center listings.

There are so many aspects of Google Search, it challenging to get a full perspective on it. The key thing about Google Search is that it is for users. It not for showing Google how good your content or site is. Danny Sullivan has stated “I wouldn’t recommend people start adding carts because it “shows Google” any more than I would recommend anyone do anything they think “shows Google” something. You want to do things that make sense for your visitors, because that is what ‘shows Google’ you have a great site.”

Here are some articles that will further explain:

What You Need to Know About Google Search

While Google says, “Inclusion in Google’s search results is easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully-automated search engine that uses software known as “web crawlers” that explore the web on a regular basis to find sites to add to our index.” That may simple mean “included”. It may not mean that users find your web content easy to find nor that your web pages with automatically rank. There is a lot of work to be done. You must provide updated, exceptional content these days.

To be at the top of search results when a user performs a Google search, Google is passionate to surfact the highest quality and most relevant results for the query. The “best” search results encompass many factors. Think of things such as the searcher’s location, language, device (desktop or phone), history of searches, and previous queries the person has clicked. For example, searching for “sail boat repair shops” would show different answers to a user in France than it would to a Minneapolis resident. Google doesn’t accept payment to rank pages higher, and ranking is done algorithmically.