How Google Works

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I've been getting a few questions about the ads on this site, especially since I mentioned the other day that I get paid if you click on them. How does that work? How much? Is it really that easy? Isn't it easy to exploit? To help answer these and other questions, allow me to present a brief explanation of Google.

These days everybody has heard of Google. Nobody Yahoos stuff, but we all 'google' things from time to time. It's even in the Oxford English Dictionary. Google today is almost synonymous with search engine. Most of you may not remember the heady days of the internet in 1996 when we used InfoSeek to find things before Disney bought it and it became Go.com. What about AltaVista? Hotbot? Dogpile? Does anyone remember when they could AskJeeves? My how things have changed.

Back in those days, people making websites used to assign 'keywords' to them to let people know what sort of content they might expect to find. Search engines like the ones I just mentioned would serve you results that matched the keywords you typed in. That's still what most people's understanding of search engines is today, but much has changed since then.

As simple as keywords were, let's face it, they sucked. Back in the day, you often had to search through pages and pages of results to find something useful, since there was no real system for sorting 3 million results for 'pamela anderson' into what was relevant and what wasn't. And there was nothing to stop people putting phony keywords on their website to show up better in search engines even when the keywords had nothing to do with what their site was about. Primitive! And that was before Napster and BitTorrent and MySpace and blogging. There are millions more websites out there now to sift through.

Yahoo! was around back then. They had a different idea to most other folks which involved sorting websites into categories, meaning you could browse through and find what you wanted that way. Problem was it took lots of human labour to sort through and verify sites that went into the directory. Not only that, but which categories to put things in? Which categories to set up in the first place? It was a good idea in theory, but it belonged in the age of the public library, not the global information network. Remember when people used to call it the information superhighway? Those people are still in marketing today dreaming up new ways to sell you bottled water.

Necessity is always the mother of invention of course and in 1996 two students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were frustrated with the way current search engines worked, probably after getting less than satisfactory results for 'pamela anderson'. They reasoned that it made more sense that sites should be ranked using their relationship to other sites than simply by the number of times a keyword appeared on a page. More specifically, sites that had a lot of links coming to them from other sites must surely be the more relevant and trusted sources of information than sites out there all by themselves.

After setting up a test search engine on their university servers and doing some testing, Page and Brin realised they were onto something. In 1998 they founded Google Inc as a private company and took their new search engine public. It quickly became popular due to the simple bare-bones design which differed from the cluttered layout of other search engines, and of course due to the much improved relevance of the search results.

In 2000, Google started selling advertising on its search results pages. Advertisers would choose to have their ads appear next to search results for specified keywords, and pay whenever someone clicked on their ad. The amount they paid would differ depending on how popular the keyword was - words that were searched for more often attracted higher prices. In this manner, Google started making money, all the while improving the technology behind their search engine.

Google's search technology is called PageRank. Each day, automated software on Google's servers called bots and spiders crawls through all the pages on the entire internet, reading quickly through them and following any links on each page. The software then assigns a score to each page - its PageRank. The scores themselves and the exact way they are calculated is a closely guarded secret, but the concept works on trust-building similar to relationships among human networks.

If we want answers, we go to the source we trust most first. If we don't know who to ask for answers, we'll find someone we trust who does. The more someone is trusted, more people will trust them, and the more we will trust people who also trust them. On a small scale, think of your local church group. On a large scale, think Oprah's Book Club. Google ranks its search results from the most reliable first. Hence, the sites with the most traffic and the most sites linking to them will score highest. If the site linking to you also has a high score, your score will be even higher. Google works on a system of positive reinforcement.

How do you become a reliable source in the first place? By being reliable. Like in real life, being a good source of information will cause more people to seek your advice more often. And, importantly, also like real life, it may be easy to trick someone at first, but you'll soon get a reputation.

Google had clearly hit upon the right formula for the new age, an incredible feat of genius which they then capitalised on by making an obscene fortune out of it. Google's revenues in 2007 were US$16 billion, 99% of which came from advertising. Their automated system for advertisers, called AdWords, is so simple and effective it has become the defacto standard across the internet. Of their advertising revenue in 2007, 60% came from ads on Google's own search results pages, while 40% came from another feat of genius called AdSense.

AdSense completes the chain which links online advertisers to online audiences. There are billions of websites on the internet today, and people are spending less time reading books, newspapers and watching TV, and spending more time online. This is causing havoc for the publishing and broadcasting companies, but creating fantastic opportunities for those in the online world.

AdSense is designed for people who own websites to earn money from them. By allocating space on your webpage to AdSense, Google automatically inserts ads in that space for you. Having already crawled your page to see what it is about, Google then inserts relevant ads into your page, from the same database which serves ads onto Google's own search results pages. This creates even more value for advertisers using the AdWords system as their ads appear not only on Google's pages but on millions of sites across the internet. When people click on the ads, the advertiser pays, Google takes the money and gives a percentage to the website owner whose site the ad appeared on. How much depends on a variety of factors such as the popularity of the keyword and the site's PageRank. It's simple, automatic, and happens millions and millions of times a day across the internet, helping Google amass a small fortune in the process.

To cut a long story short, yes I do get paid when you click those ads. It's not much, but it adds up and it's automatic. And the software is usually smart enough to know when you're cheating, so it's best not to go clicking just for the hell of it, but you should find the ads are actually relevant, and the more popular my site gets, the better the ads will be and the more I will get paid for them.

So how can you help me? Assuming you want to of course. Tell people about the site. Link to me on your own site or on your Facebook profile. Comment on posts like this one if you have something to say. And by all means click on an ad or two if it interests you. Most of all, keep coming back