How Google Works
How Google Works
As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services. For more information or to share your thoughts, visit ourHelp Forum.
How Search Works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded#!
Source: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/
Search Engine Optimization Singapore is the process of improving a website such that it best follows the Search Engine’s algorithm, and eventually gets the website highly ranked on the natural results, and thus more traffic.
Google has a complex set of 200 algorithms!
If you like to know how you could get yourself on the first page of Google’s natural results, look for a good Singapore SEO agency to advise you. Contact us at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net
Google: Improved localized search
4/16/2010 09:00:00 AM
We spend a lot of time thinking about search results, but we also spend a lot of time thinking about search queries. Today we’re announcing three enhancements to help you input your searches more quickly and easily: more localized Google Suggest, improved spell correction for names and auto-correction for 31 languages.
Feel at home with Google Suggest
Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S. You may notice that the list of queries beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than it used to:
- In San Francisco [bart] is probably not Bart Simpson; it’s probably Bay Area Rapid Transit:
- In Chicago it’s easy to find out about your local NBA team:
While Suggest can help you find good queries, sometimes you can get stuck because of misspellings. That’s why for years we’ve offered corrected spellings for mistyped searches (with the “Did you mean” link). We’ve steadily improved this spelling technology over time, but recently we made some big strides in correcting misspelled names.
People often search for people’s names — and not just celebrities and old friends. They look for doctors, horse trainers, hang-gliding instructors… the searches are just as diverse as the personalities in your hometown. We’ve noticed that people sometimes struggle to correctly spell names, and it’s not surprising. Names can be complicated and often there are multiple common spellings.
Our new technology is based on the concept that people often know something else about the person besides the approximate spelling of his name. People often include other terms such as “composer” or “lawyer sparta wisconsin” in their search query, which provides valuable context to help us narrow the range of possibilities for the spelling correction. We use these additional descriptive words to offer you better suggestions. Some examples: [matthew devin oracle], [yuri lehner stanford], [simon tung machine learning]. With these improvements you’ll start seeing more useful spell corrections for names.
For now this enhancement is available in our English spelling system in the U.S. We’ll be rolling out the change to other parts of the world and other languages in the coming months.
Another improvement we made recently to the spelling system is auto-correction. If you search for [aiprt], rather than showing you a link on your results page that says “Did you mean: airport” we’ll take you straight to the results for the corrected search. We auto-correct when we’re highly confident in our correction in order to get you the information you’re looking for that much faster. In the past week we’ve expanded auto-correction to 31 languages across over 180 domains, with more to come.
Did you make a typo while looking for [chocolate strawberries and cream] in Italian? The right word is so close you can taste it:
While saving you that unnecessary click, we make search that much faster.
Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
Friday, April 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.
- Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Apart from improving your site speed, there are said to be over 200+ algorithm that can affect your site rankings in Google.
Read more about our Singapore SEO methodologies and know-how or contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us
Facebook More Popular Than Google: So?
According to Hitwise, Facebook just became more popular than Google Search.
become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week
Not sure of HitWises methodology – why aren’t they comparing all Google’s web functions, including Maps and Mail? – but good on Facebook! For a site that didn’t exist in 2003, that is quite some achievement.
What does this mean for the future of search marketing?
Not much.
Given the lock-in for return visits, it’s unsurprising that Facebook might receive more visits than a search engine. However, the most important aspect of different channels, as far as a web marketer is concerned, is: does the traffic convert to cash at some point?
Measure Success
Social Media Marketing, like SEO, is a tatic. However, if the tactic don’t translate into more business, then it’s a waste of time. Whatever channel you use, it is important to establish KPIs – key performance indicators – that measure the effectiveness of your tactics, and directly relate to the success of you business.
For example, one of the KPIs often mentioned in SMM is volume metrics, such as number of followers, subscribers etc. If we were to relate this metric back to our business objectives, we’d ask how does having a higher number of followers, or people claiming to be followers, result in more business? How many of those followers are really engaging with you? Or are they, literally, just making up the numbers?
I’ve seen social media companies fudge this aspect. Some play around with the term ROI, changing the “I” from “investment” to “influence”, or to “interest”, and use the number of followers as evidence of the level of interest in a clients services or brand.
The bottom line is the golden KPI. It can become blurred in bigger organizations, but for the little guy, it is crucial.
Volume Metrics Can Be Deceiving
Search marketers know that the volume game can be an illusion when it comes to making money.
“Jokes” may be a very popular keyword term, but it’s not making people any money because there is no commercial intent. “Second mortgages” is not a particularly popular term in terms of volume, but is lucrative as it has clear commercial intent. A high position for second mortgages in search rankings will make you money.
Conversely, how difficult would it be to get buzz around the term “second mortgages” via social media? Sure, with some inventive twisting and disguising of the true message it could be done, but really, it’s pushing water uphill. The social environment isn’t really suited to such a message.
Choose The Right Environment
The two channels are like apples and oranges.
Different environments work for different messages. Social media is great for generating awareness, getting people talking, and when integrated with an SEO strategy can be a great way of getting links. Primarily, it’s a brand strategy. However, because it is a social environment, there is less tolerance of overt commercial activity that in direct channels.
Typical social media measurements include:
- Business outcomes – can you link the campaign to specific interactions, such as sales?
- Influencer Reach – how many influencers picked up on your message and spread it?
- Audience Reach – how many visitors saw your message? Link this metric to…
- Engagement – how many of those people who saw you message contacted you, or took a desired action?
Conversely, SEO isn’t much use for building brand awareness or encouraging people to talk about your message. The environment is similar to direct marketing. It is well suited to direct response and commercial activity, as the intent of the user can be determined, and if that intent is commercial, then people welcome commercial messages.
What Is Your Business
Hanging out and being cool on Facebook isn’t a business 
Business on the web typically falls into one of nine groups. Which is yours?
- Brokerage – bringing buyers and sellers together
- Advertising – displaying/selling advertising
- Infomediary – run programs such as ad networks
- Merchant – sell stuff
- Manufacturer (Direct) – make and sell stuff
- Affiliate – sell other peoples stuff and take a commission
- Community – leverage your community to sell something else
- Subscription – sell content/training on an on-going basis
- Utility – pay as you go usage
Decide which business you are in. When deciding on marketing and advertising tactics, ask yourself which environment is best suited to developing your business, then develop KPIs that support that business. You key KPI should be the bottom line – either this activity returns more money than you spend, or it doesn’t.
Stats Put Android Ahead Of iPhone In Eight States
There’s encouraging news for Google in the Android vs. iPhone war. A company that’s delivered more than one billion applications, games, ringtones, videos, and wallpapers to mobile users claims Android has topped the iPhone in terms of user concentration in eight states.
As the map below shows, these eight states are Arizona, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Then another five states are considered swing states, leaving the last 37 under Apple’s control.
Obviously, these findings don’t represent a true victory for Google even if they’re absolute facts. The states associated with Android aren’t all chockfull of people, and eight to 37 isn’t a good ratio. Apple fans are sure to point out that Myxer is relatively new to the stats game, as well.
Still, the data indicates that Android’s gained a lot of ground within a certain sample group, and that it’s done so at a more than reasonable pace. What’s more, Myxer’s promised to update the map every quarter, meaning we’ll get a better idea of how things are trending as time goes by.
According to Myxer, “A total of one million unique users from both the Android and iPhone operating systems were used to make this comparison.”