Understanding the King of Search Engines and SEO Today

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A laptop displaying Google's Search page.

“Google it.”

-Everyone-

If you are alive right now in 2024 you probably know Google. This is perhaps the most influential business/website/search engine in the world, and it has a rich past that has helped build it up into the absolute titan it is today. Understanding Google’s history will also give you some insight into how its search results are formed today.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was quite literally created for Google. Entire careers are made from SEO, but Google is the one it was designed to impact. Back in the late 1900’s, There were tons of search engines all competing for dominance. How did Google pull it off? What did Google do then, and now, to be the most widely used search engine in the world eighty times over? That’s not a joke. Google handles over 86 billion searches monthly, YouTube (which is owned by Google) gets more than 3 billion, and in third place we have Bing with a measly 1.4 billion searches.

We here at Acclaim wanted to do a deep dive into the history of Google, how it changed, and what you should be expecting from it when you set up your business or brand.

A picture from the late 1900's showing a young woman on a desktop computer.

The Founding of Google

Funny enough, the original name for the website in 1996 was “backrub.com”. The algorithm used in the search engine was called backrub, so the creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to just name the website after that. Not even a year later they filed for a different domain name, and in 1998 it was officially called “Google.com”

Soon the algorithm evolved from “backrub” to “PageRank” on Google’s website, and this launched the company Alphabet Inc. into stardom. The name “Google” came from a mathematical number recently named in the 90’s, and the name of the number was the last name of a professor, but it was all over popular culture, so Larry and Sergey decided that was the name. This was a time where it was breaking news that a company decided to make an actual website for their business. Newspaper articles would have front pages stating, “Wal-Mart officially launches it’s website on the world wide web!”

From 1998 until 2000 the company built its rapport, and companies were trying to get listed on it. Its competitors were mostly askjeeves.com and yahoo.com, both are still around today but are not very large websites by comparison. The end of this decade saw something truly revolutionary in search engines, advertised placements.

A laptop displaying Google Search results.

The First Major Milestones for Google

In the year 2000 Google officially let businesses know, “You can now purchase a spot at the top of our results.” The internet was mostly ad free at this point because it had only become widespread in homes around three years prior. Google launched a program known as AdWords which officially capitalized on search placements specifically. You see, Google had been showing ads off to the side of it’s webpage, and in between searches gradually throughout it’s search results, but NOW you can buy the front of the line without fail, every time… kind of.

From the years 2000-2007 Google amassed so much wealth from the AdWords program that it completely overtook every other search engine in scope, funding, and accuracy. Then, in 2007, it shifted to a more universal platform with the rise of online video players. Google now had tabs at the top, from which you could select news, images, video, search, etc. It had its own email service that was free for users, and it drew in people who did not have email addresses that they needed to sign up for web services on other sites. The popularity of Google in these years can NOT be understated as it completely reshaped the internet.

In 2006 Google took an interest in a small startup called “YouTube”. This startup’s website was a video playing service that was completely online, and anyone could upload a video right to the site from a personal account. It hadn’t seen commercial success yet, but Google was already in the process of buying many startups around the United States. They bought the tiny intellectual property for a whopping $1.6 billion. In the previous year they acquired 15 smaller startups for $135 million, but they clearly did not want anyone else buying up this one. YouTube then went on to become the most popular video playing service on the internet, and the second largest search engine in the world.

In 2008 Google launched its own web browser, Google Chrome. Now you could use Google to Google things while you Googled other things. Chrome has become somewhat popular and often competes with Firefox and Edge nowadays. Google Chrome adds another layer of information to your search results. Now that Google is watching every link, picture, video, or website it can serve you search results based upon that knowledge. This gets even more insane once voice features come around as you are then listened to by your microphone as well. If Google hears your voice talking about dog food it will cross reference every page, every app, and every purchase done on your account and will start giving you sponsored ads for dog food. It sounds dystopian, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else.

In 2012 Google launched the “Knowledge Graph” which was another game changer. If you search for a common question in Google, it will answer you directly with its sources cited. It has been twelve years since the update, so many people might have forgotten what Google changed. It created a new algorithm that stored and connected data point, websites, and language on pages all across the internet and served them up as bite-sized snippets of text for people searching something trivial, like “What is the circumference of the Earth?” Google could now save its users time since they didn’t have to scroll through search results to get the answers to questions with definite answers.

A phone showing multiple apps, notably Google Chrome and YouTube, companies both owned by Google.

Algorithm Updates and Their Impact

The same year that Google launched its “Knowledge Graph” it also updated it’s search engine with one of the first filters. The update, called “Penguin” was originally the mascot of an open-source operating system called “Linux”, and Google asked to use the name and animal as a gesture in kind towards a free and open internet.

This update learned what was on every page of every website registered to appear on Google and used context clues to direct people to valuable websites. It filtered out bad actors and punished websites that were misleading, harmful, or spam so that they did not show up in search results. You may not remember the version of Google with everything listed without that update, but the growing concern for years was that search engines were going to be overrun with senseless websites that were only there to mislead people. Google had other updates throughout the years: Panda, Hummingbird, and RankBrain, but the most transformative update was Penguin, the first update.

The impact of these updates cannot be understated as websites now have to improve their ranking the old-fashioned way, through discipline, value, and hard work. It eventually led to websites striving to optimize their websites for search engines. If only we had enough creativity to call it something else, we ended up just calling it “SEO” which you will hear a lot in web design and marketing.

From 2012 today we have seen a blitz of marketers, advertisers, and web developers trying to master and sell search engine optimization as it has become a necessity for businesses in the modern age. You can not have decent web traffic if you do not show up in search results, it’s that simple. This has led to entire fields of study trying to figure out how the algorithms work in search engines, mainly Google, but it has become commonplace among all search engines to have a filter on their search results. Search engine optimization is now a field of study.

* Side note: The algorithm Google uses to determine search results is a well-kept secret and many attempts have been over the years to try and acquire it to no avail. We have seen leaks throughout the years, but Google has modified the algorithm so often and so completely that the information is often obsolete. *

Since these updates, companies all around the world have spent an absurd amount of money trying to rank themselves higher in Google’s search results, but here is the catch: to rank higher you need to provide value to the people searching. That is the best tactic to rank on Google. Create valuable articles, valuable services, and portray valuable information and Google naturally picks it up, analyses it, and presents it to people using the search engine. It’s a simple yet painstaking process.

The Google Pixel, Google's first smartphone.

Mobile-First Indexing and Voice Search

Think back to the year 2012, where smartphones started becoming a standard device every person owned. Well, websites had not caught up to mobile device users at this point. Every smartphone simply displayed the website as you would see it on a desktop computer. In the years leading up to 2018 multiple companies started optimizing the website for mobile users, and it became known as “responsive design”. The design of the website would “respond” to whatever device it was being viewed on.

In 2013 Google launched it’s first smartphone, the Google Pixel. It was highly integrated with Google’s applications it had acquired over the years and had an AI voice assistant to manage your calendar, send messages, and anything else you could want from a smart phone. This is foreshadowing since Google now had a vested interest in the success of it’s phone.

In 2018 Google officially started prioritizing websites that had used this responsive design to better accommodate smartphones. This wasn’t just a simple changeover, this was a cultural and technological shift by this point. Google was telling us that not everyone had a computer at home, but most everyone had a computer in their pocket, and if you didn’t adjust your website for mobile devices then you weren’t going to appear as high in search.

As if phones didn’t already control all the facets of our lives Google went one step further. Now you can search using a voice command from your phone or desktop, but not every desktop has a microphone, while every phone does. This troubled a lot of people, because if Google knows enough information it can cater your searches to your demographic. When we say Google sees everything, it really does. It will show results for content geared more towards age, culture, nationality, location, and even the information gleamed off the apps you use like Facebook or Reddit. Now Google had data on even the nuances in your voice and could cater the search results to whatever it categorized you as.

Current Best SEO Practices for Google

High-quality content is the best approach. It takes the most time, and is the most arduous, but it will help you out more than anything you can possibly imagine. Taking the time to write blogs and articles for your website will signal to Google that you are offering up valuable information and Google will more likely show people your site because of that work. This can be done the wrong way. To give you an example, if you have a cooking recipe site and you start off every recipe with a novel about where you grew up and those beautiful summer evenings on the porch talking to your grandfather before he passed away…. I mean Google is going to have no clue who to serve your content, is it a biography or a cooking page? Be cognizant of your content and do your best to stay on topic.

Technical SEO, also known as “off-page” SEO, is also another important part of your search engine optimization strategy. Make sure your website loads quickly, has effective and updated responsive design, and that there are no broken links or faulty images. Peoples’ attention spans have all but evaporated over the years with the rise of short-form content and immediately gratifying video games, so you must make sure they don’t wait more than 3 seconds to view your website. It sounds shallow, and it is, but it’s something you must account for.

Do not just repeat the keywords you want to focus on, create a diverse pool of information. If Google sees you are a music label, and your website just has the words “music label” repeated endlessly it will qualify you unfit for search engine results and you will be stuck in limbo. Try to mention important keywords or phrases around 5-10% of the time, that is the sweet spot.

After You Have Googled It

The history of Google is nothing short of astounding, starting off as “backrub.com” of all things, and then becoming the largest entity on the internet by a landslide. The adaptations and purchases Google has made throughout the years also lent to it’s success as it now owns the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube.

When accounting for SEO on your website, social media, or videos make sure to provide valuable content. Do not want to repeat keywords, deliver paper-thin vacuous material, or lie on your website to try and trick Google into showing your website as a result, you will be penalized for those actions. You must work hard to create, deliver, and market quality information on your website to make it onto Google.

If you have any questions about Google, SEO, or with help creating quality content, reach out to us here at Acclaim anytime.