Google Suggest

Google search


The domain attracted at least 135 million U.S. visitors in May 2008.

The search engine


Google's algorithm uses a patented system called PageRank to help rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive score for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank derives from human-generated links, and is thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance. The exact percentage of the total of web pages that Google indexes is not known, as it is very hard to actually calculate. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists, reported to be a number over 200.

Search results

Google not only indexes and caches web pages but also takes "snapshots" of other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files and much more. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to (X)HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.


Non-web sources of data

Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data in databases, which are accessible from websites by means of queries but not by links. This so-called deep web is minimally covered by Google and contains, for example, catalogs of libraries, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, and more.

Google optimization


As Google's algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, commercial websites will profit from subverting these results by artificially inflating their rankings. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific Google rankings by various artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their client's sites. One of Google's main challenges has been to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.


The Google webmaster guidelines were published for website owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.

Uses of Google

A corollary use of Google—and other Internet search engines—is that it can help translators to determine the most common way of expressing ideas in the English language (and other languages). This is generally done by doing a 'count' of different variants, thereby establishing which expression is more common. While this approach requires careful judgment, it does improve the ability of non-native translators to use more idiomatically correct English expressions.

Google dance

Google dance refers to the period of time when Google indices are tuned. This will often cause both a fluctuation in index size as well a significant change in a web site's search result position.

"Google Dance" also refers to the annual party at the Googleplex during the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conferences.


The Google search engine has many intuitive features making it more functional. This could have played a role in making it as popular as it is today. Google is one of the top ten most-visited websites today. Some of its features include a definition link for most searches including dictionary words, a list of how many results you got on your search, links to other searches (e.g. you misspelled something, it gives you a link to the search results had you typed in the correct search), and many more. It is unknown whether functionality, speed, or luck brought it its peak status.

Search syntax

Google's search engine normally accepts queries as a simple text area, and breaks up the user's text into a sequence of search terms, which will usually be words that are to occur in the results, but may also be phrases, delimited by quotations marks ("), qualified terms, with a prefix such as "+", "-", or one of several advanced operators, such as "site:". The Google Help Pages document all of these additional queries.


Query expansion


  • Stemming is used to increase search quality by keeping small syntactic variants of search terms ;

"I'm Feeling Lucky"

Google's homepage includes a button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky". When a user clicks on the button the user will be taken directly to the first search result, bypassing the search engine results page. The thought is that, if a user is "feeling lucky", the search engine will return the perfect match the first time without having to page through the search results.


Search engine features

Besides the main search engine feature of searching for text, the search engine can also be used as a calculator, base, unit and currency converter, dictionary and many other useful tools.

Error messages

Some searches will give a 403 Forbidden error with the text
"We're sorry...



followed by a CAPTCHA prompt.






Domain names

In addition to the main URL, Google owns 160 domain names for each of the countries/regions in which it has been localized. As Google is an American company, the main domain name can be considered as the U.S. one though the gTLD .com can be used by any company in the world (not only those from the United States). does exist but is only a redirection to because dot-US is by far less common than dot-com in the United States. An example is or


Some domain names unregistered by Google are currently squatted:

  • (Ukraine), the correct URL is
  • (Belarus), the correct URL is
  • (Cameroon), common mis-typing of (there is no localized version for Cameroon)
  •, the correct spelling of the number one googol, or 10^100, to which the name Google is a reference.

Search products

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Google Product Search, Google Maps, Google Co-op and Google Desktop Search.


See also


Further reading

  • Google Hacks from O'Reilly is a book containing tips about using Google effectively. Now in its third edition. ISBN 0-596-52706-3.
  • SEO for Google by Paul Bliss - an eBook that describes in precise detail the methods needed to get your site top rankings in Google for your keywords.
  • Barroso, Luiz Andre; Dean, Jeffrey; Hölzle, Urs (2003). "Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture". IEEE micro 23 (2): 22–28.

External links

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