Thanks
a lot for your wonderful response to my previous blog “An attempt to explore
the Digital World”. It was heartening to see the number of views and comments. The
offline feedback was also very encouraging. So here is the second post which
talks about Google as a search engine.
A re-iteration that the information here will be of very basic nature.Keeping this in mind, let's try to answer some very basic questions - How does a lay man understand the result page which is displayed? How does
this help Digital Marketers to promote
their product, and what is in it for Google?
Google has become an integral part of our
lives. It has become a genie for us, who fulfills all our wishes. Any
information we need; the first thing we turn towards is the Google search engine
and type in our query. To our surprise most of the times the search results are apt. Have we ever wondered how does this search engine give the
desired output. Well, this is possible because of a complex algorithm in the back end which helps to
generate search results. This algorithm decides on the results that are shown
to the end users, and has multiple steps involved to decide the page rank too.
This algorithm is not that easy to understand even by the experienced in the
field. However one thing that is easy to understand is how this benefits the
digital marketers, and in turn Google.
Let’s take an example to understand this
further. When I enter Digital Marketing as the search term, I get the following
result page:
So if you see the above screenshot, the result
page can be divided into two types:
- One where you can see “Ad” mentioned, and highlighted in the red box; also called as inorganic search results.
- While the other in the center is more general in nature and related to the search term (in this case “Digital Marketing”). This is also called as Organic search results.
The area highlighted in red is the place where
google places ads depending on your search term. In this case as my search term
was Digital Marketing, the ads displayed are related to the same. So this
is the area eyed by Digital Marketers to place ads for their products. As one can
see in this example, most of the ads feature the courses offered by various
institutes related to Digital Marketing. If I go and click on any of these ads,
the company placing the same will be charged an amount. Hence it has a monetary
significance for Google. Google earns revenue from these advertisements. These
ads are placed by using Google Adwords. So next time when you click on any of these
ads, it means Google has earned an amount based on the action you performed. Imagine the revenue that you have generated for Google so far J
I hope you found this simple concept interesting. In the next post I will talk a little more about Google
Adwords and how it works.
