Online Markting Info

Search Engine News

Latest search engine news – keeping you up to date with what’s happening on the internet

Google's International Growth in 2009

A recent report by Search Engine News shows the growth of Google in international markets in 2009. Despite the substantial down turn in global markets, which started in the USA in 2007 with the sub-prime mortgage collapse, the search engine giant has still grown overall thanks to 12.57% annualised growth in international market. This was more than enough to cover the 2.4% USA growth and the 8.18% decline from the UK. By comparison to the 2008 figures 2009 seems like a slow year but this shouldn't worry the search engine in the slightest.

For companies and their online marketing efforts this is fantastic news. Many of the worlds developing nations are growing with immense speed and countries in the Far East and Asia seem to be recovering the economic crisis before American and European nations. These new markets can be very lucrative for companies looking to grow internationally. The recession seems to be leaving and consumer confidence is increasing again to previous levels. Not attempting to enter new markets at this crucial point in time could be a missed opportunity.

How does a search engine work?

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing (MSN) and these are all crawler based search engines. A crawler based search engine is one that uses a computer program known as a robot or spider to crawl through websites to extract information. There are other types of search engines which are human powered directories. In the early days of the internet directory style search engines were the most common, website simply added themselves into directories and when users searched they would be provided a list of relevant websites.

These human powered directories quickly began to produce hybrid searches, or mixed results which were the first sign of crawler based search engines. Even today the influences of human directories can be seen. Google, amongst others, regards the Wikipedia directory of information with high value and its pages frequent search results. Yahoo also uses information from the dmoz.org directory where it takes the description of a website and uses this for its results pages. Despite these small instances of human directory intervention they are no longer in use and computer algorithms have taken over.

Search engines have got a lot smarter since then and today's search engine is extremely powerful, intelligent and always updating their performance. Most search engines divide the results pages into two sections - one for natural or organic results and the other for paid for adverts. Search engine optimisation is used to get better rankings in organic results and Pay Per Click is the term associated with advertising on the search result page.

Search engine crawlers (for natural search results) visit websites regularly and retrieve information. This information is indexed into a database. The index is then used to present a listing of websites to users who make a search. The complex part for search engines is to decide which website or webpage should be listed first and to decide on the rankings (the positions that each page is listed in). Almost all search engines work on the basis of relevance. The most appropriate page is listed at the top depending on what the user has searched for and relevance is determined by 100's of factors. The decisions taken on which website to rank and where to list them is determined by algorithms which are a set of rules designed by the search engines. Each search engine has a slightly different method and the rules are constantly changing.

The crawler itself is able to visit websites at speed and its information is added into search results very fast. Considering the number of websites on the internet and how quickly new pages are added (news websites for example will add 100's of new pages in a week, forums are another example of quickly growing websites) the volume of information is staggering. In fact in 2008 Google announced it has indexed over 1 trillion pages (1,000,000,000,000) while in 1998 there were only 26 million indexed pages. By comparison Wikipedia has approx 30 million pages in Google's index.

For advertising listings on results pages a different approach is taken. When a website creates an advertising campaign the adverts appear on result pages if they are deemed relevant to the search the user has made. Determining relevance here is done by the website and the search engine. The website owner will decide where they would like adverts to appear (naturally being adverting there are costs involved so the website will want to make sure their adverts only appear where its relevant). The search engine also checks adverts and the websites to maintain quality for users. Crawlers are used for this. Rankings on the other had are decided by price, the more a website is willing to pay, the higher up the rankings the advert appears.

For more information ready through our SEO Guide or see the glossary for easy to understand definitions of the terminology used with search engines.