Why Google Is Number One

 

It is now just after 17 years to the day that the domain name Google.com was registered.

It was on the 15th of September 1997 that this company that has become a modern behemoth was launched. Since then it has come from nothing to be valued at 395 Billion dollars and the world’s most valuable brand, even eclipsing Apple.

Google was the winner of the search engine wars.

At the time I completely missed the significance of this. I suppose most people did. When the internet was young the idea that a search engine was to become one of the most important internet tools was just nonsense. A search engine was just a utilitarian site. It didn’t have content of it’s own, so how on earth could it be important?

The company strategists knew though. Search engines were an important battleground because the people who won it would be guaranteed millions of hits every day.

Actually this figure completely underquotes the level of traffic that Google gets. Google currently gets 45,000 searches per SECOND. The number of hits per day is in the billions.

This gives Google an enormous amount of power.

They know what people are searching for. In aggregate this information is incredible powerful. Obviously the way Google uses it is to sell advertising. But it can also be used to identify social trends.

Why do you think we continue to hear about the Kardashians? Because people continue to search for them. So PLEASE!! Stop doing that. What happens is that magazine editors check the stats, see people are still searching and that’s that.

For more information on this, look up Google Trends. It will actually show you what the top web searches are for any given day, and the top searches on a year by year basis. It makes quite interesting reading.

It’s why getting onto page one of Google is so important. Contrary to what some guy from India will tell you, no one can guarantee you page one on Google. (By the way I actually heard this straight from the horses mouth – a Google executive at a seminar) There are tricks to help raise your profile over time, but Google works diligently to ensure that any dirty tricks will be penalised.

The Google algorithm is also constantly being updated.

It makes it hard to keep up with SEO but some of us have to. Every day seeking to understand more of what it is that Google wants to see in order to move your site in the search ranking.

I will be putting up a post soon about what are the latest and greatest ways to raise your search engine rankings according to the latest algorithms Google use, so keep an eye out for it.

Why Google won

Google traffic per day

Google Trends