This weekly column will feature the latest topics and trends constantly emerging in a rapidly-growing technical world.
Each week, we will focus on a specific technical topic, with topics covering a wide range of technical issues and the latest technical gadgets.
If there are any topics or products that you would like to see covered in this column, please email editor@etown.edu.
According to seotribunal.com, the Google Search Engine alone receives over 63,000 searches per second. If we take this statistic further, that adds up to 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour and a staggering 5.6 billion searches per day.
To put this into perspective, there are approximately 7.7 billion people in the world today. 5.6 billion searches would mean that if each of the 5.6 billion searches per day were individual people, roughly 73 percent of the population uses just the Google Search Engine to answer their most pressing questions. If we factor in other popular search engines (like Bing, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.), the number skyrockets.
Rather than continuing to list the mind-blowing facts about current search engine trends, let’s dig deeper into the core of the Google Search Engine to discover exactly how you receive the information you searched for in roughly the same time it takes a person to blink their eyes. Fair warning, the results can be mind-boggling.
When you type in keywords or a key phrase/key question in the Google Search Engine, magic happens. Literally.
The Google Search Engine operates on an algorithm called the “PageRank Algorithm,” which, you guessed it, ranks pages according to their relevancy to your search query.
However, relevancy is not the only thing the PageRank algorithm takes into consideration when factoring the differences between which websites show up on the first page of your Google Search results and which websites show up on the subsequent, less visited pages.
The PageRank algorithm incorporates over 200 factors into its sorting and delivery of your personal results. These factors are sorted into two categories (on-page and off-page) and include, but are certainly not limited to, the following: links, page popularity, domain popularity, relevancy, keywords associated with the pages and content associated with the pages.
However, the most important thing to note about the PageRank algorithm is not its ability to rank and provide you with the most accurate results for your query, but the speed at which this process happens.
According to sciencing.com, the average blink of an eye lasts about one-tenth of a second. After typing the query “how long does it take for someone to blink” into the Google Search Engine, it took Google 0.63 seconds to display 65,900,000 results.
Blink your eyes 6 times and you have the speed at which Google processes your keyword search, considers over 200 factors that correlate to your search and displays approximately 65 million results. Isn’t that truly amazing?
Unfortunately, this is barely scratching the surface of all the intricacies of any search engine software, let alone Google’s.
After all, the technologies of the current industry and world are rapidly changing and constantly improving, making search results stronger, faster and more accurate than ever before.
