Understanding Google Search Engine

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:

1. One where you can see “Ad” mentioned, and highlighted in the red box; also called as inorganic search results.
2. 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.