When Google first introduced its search engine, it deviated from the mainstream popular search engines in use so far on many grounds. Popular search engines till then, had concentrated mostly on the exhaustiveness of their database while giving little attention to the quality of results displayed. The results displayed so far, concentrated more on keyword placement and their frequency and place of occurrence. This had led the search engines to fall prey to predatory search engines tactics being increasingly used by some people and companies which saw getting in search results as an easy ticket to online publicity. While such companies exist even today, focusing on Google’s algorithm as well, Google because of its dynamic search algorithms has been making this increasingly difficult.
Some of the main factors responsible for Google’s popularity today have been, Google’s PageRank Algorithm, hidden parameters in its algorithms making manipulation difficult and Google’s commitment to maintain high quality standards, which means not selling top search result spots, separating sponsored ads etc.
PageRank:
PageRank, a trademark of Google, is a link analysis algorithm. As discussed in the section ‘How search engines work’, spiders of search engines crawl links to reach to a website. Google, however, uses these in-links to a website to determine its importance on the World Wide Web. Each in-link from a Web page is taken to be a vote for that particular webpage. But the catch is- all the votes from all the Web pages are not equal. Votes from important pages are given more importance compared to votes from not so important pages. Google uses PageRank as a numerical weight assigned to a Web page based on this analysis. Now a page with PageRank say 2 will get half the importance as compared to a page with PageRank 4. But this is not the end; the importance of the votes will also depend on how many out-links are present on the page whose vote is counted. Hence in the above example, a ‘PageRank 4’ Web page with 2 out-links are treated same as a ‘PageRank 2’ Web page with 1 out-link.
The nature of the algorithm by itself makes it secure to manipulation, since the importance of votes decreases if there are too many links pointing out. However, Google also employs lots of undisclosed techniques to ward-off manipulation and give importance only to links which have built naturally, i.e. by genuine referencing and citation.
The PageRank feature of Google along with the relevancy score based on key terms searched for and some other factors, determines the rank of Web pages in Google search results.
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