Why Google Delivers More Targeted Results Than Other Search Engines

Like most of the major search engines, Google assembles the pages in its search index by using special “searchbot” or crawler software to scour the Web. Found pages are automatically added to Google’s ever-expanding database; when you perform a search, you’re actually searching this database of Web pages, not the Web itself.

The results of your Google searches are ranked according to Google’s trademarked PageRank technology. This technology measures how many other pages link to a particular page; the more links to a page, the higher that page ranks. In addition, PageRank assigns a higher weight to links that come from higher-ranked pages. So if a page is linked to from a number of high-ranked pages, that page will itself achieve a higher ranking.

The theory is that the more popular a page is, the higher that page’s ultimate value. While this sounds a little like a popularity contest (and it is), it’s surprising how often this approach delivers high-quality results.

The number of Web pages indexed by Google is among the largest of all search engines (Google and AllTheWeb are continually jockeying for “biggest” bragging rights), which means you stand a fairly good chance of actually finding what you were searching for. And the Google search engine is relatively smart; it analyzes the keywords in your query and recognizes the type of search result you’re looking for. (For example, if you enter a person’s name and city, it knows to search its phone book—not the general Web index.)