by Hernani Cerqueira

Created on: June 29, 2009

A rough estimate of mine tells me that at least 95% of web surfers are using Google on a daily basis. In fact, many people confuse Google with the World Wide Web itself. I've seen people typing urls in the Google search box. As an example, using Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I found that the word Yahoo, at the time of this writing, has a global monthly search volume of almost 414.000.000! There are thousands of people accessing Google's main competitor through Google

How this phenomenon happened? This is a question with no easy answer, but we can make some speculation. One of the reasons that any person with slight knowledge of the history of the Web will immediately consider is that Google has the luck to be in the right place at the right time, I mean, Google was, and still is, the number one search engine on an era where the number of internet users increases at an astonishing speed every year. And Google is the main entrance door for every internet beginner.

Of course we must also consider how they got there before the explosion of the internet, and that can be easily explained. At the time of Google appearance, search engines used to analyze the content of the web, ranking the importance of a page based on the number of times a search term appeared on it. Google creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, imagined that the pages with the most links from other also relevant web pages must be the ones with higher relevancy to the search. So, they created an algorithm to be used in a new search engine, initially called BlackRub, in order to test their theory as part of their studies at the Stanford University. Quickly the search engine became noticed because of its more accurate search results, and because internet was so much smaller than it is today, in no time Google become the world leading search engine.

In the next years Google was able to maintain its position and even increase the distance to its opponents. Google has some of the greatest engineers on its payroll, and they never stop improving the algorithm to provide even better search results, and to fight the techniques used by many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts to deceive search engines. Also, as everyone knows, secret is the soul of business, and their ranking mechanism is only described partially on the official patent, what makes clones difficult to appear, at least with as many quality as Google.

Besides the search engine, Google also offers some other great services, like free web based email (Gmail) or a blogging platform (Blogger), but their great source of income it's their advertising solution, Adwords for advertisers complemented by Adsense for publishers. Adsense is also the number one source of income for most owners of websites that do not sell any goods or services. Knowing this, it's easy to imagine that if Google pays their bills, webmasters have all reasons in the world to help promoting Google even more.

This hegemony is going to be very difficult to fight by competitors already in the market or that will appear in the future, and Google is well known for acquiring everything that threats to be the next big thing on the Internet, even a direct competitor, so, in the near future I can only imagine the popularity of Google to grow even more.

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