Google

Google is the world’s most widely used search engine, handling an estimated 16.4 billion searches per day. Launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University, Google has grown to dominate the global search market, consistently accounting for over 90% of the worldwide search engine market share.

At its core, Google is a system designed to crawl, index, and rank the content of the web in order to serve users with the most relevant and useful results for their search queries. It does this through a constantly evolving set of algorithms and systems that assess hundreds of signals — from the words on a page to the number and quality of links pointing to it — to determine which content deserves to rank highly.

Google’s core processes include:

• Crawling — discovering web pages by following links across the internet using automated bots known as Googlebot.
• Indexing — processing and storing the content of crawled pages in Google’s index, ready to be retrieved when a relevant query is made.
• Ranking — ordering indexed pages in response to a search query based on relevance, quality, and a wide range of other signals.

For the vast majority of websites, Google is the primary source of organic search traffic, making it the central focus of most SEO strategies. Understanding how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks content is fundamental to SEO. The same applies to keeping up with the regular algorithm updates Google releases throughout the year, which can significantly impact how pages are ranked. While other search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo are worth considering, optimising for Google will typically have the greatest impact on organic visibility and traffic.