Ever done some egosurfing and Google your own name? And wondered how the ranking is done? Google's algorithm called PageRank is a very complex (and obviously a secret) search engine. Its ranking of any search word is dependent on many factors but it has revealed a few:
1. How long the site has been around? Since many sites come and go, the longer presence on the Net and better still, you own that website, that particular site will have a relatively higher ranking.
2. How many links are connected to that site? The link is considered a vote by the net community. So more votes means higher ranking. There is a Singaporean who self procliamed that he is the most successful blogger with No. 1 ranking in the blogspace. He makes several thousand dollars a month by linking his site all over the net to increase traffic and sell ad space and e-commerce products. He uses real links. But Google is always morphing and evolving to catch fake links and ignore them.
3.Specific keywords and unique names for that site. Being asian has a natural advantage because "harold fock" is easily more unique than "james kirk". There are ways to fool the engine. Say, Paris Hilton is the top 10 highly searchable word on the net (unfortunately, it is). You can hide Paris Hilton on every page of BeyondSG and make the text invisible to the eye. Such tricks used to work. But Google engine has improved and will ignore such words.
4. There is a debate whether social network site should be ranked no. 1. A social network like Facebook means thousands are linked to you and by default should be the top site. But FB belongs to Microsoft and Google wants a piece of the social network revenue for itself too so you know how Google's engine will be tweaked ;-)
5. The popularity, brand name and uniqueness of that site. So wikipedia or C/Net or CNN will be high. So is Company website. If "harold fock" is repeatedly seen in C/Net, then C/Net will override BeyondSG because C/Net has massive global hits.
By using these 5 simple rules, you can easily figure out the ranking logic behind any search word.
The clever thing about Google is that despite all the attempts made by Microsoft and others to do a better search engine, they somehow fail to achieve a higher relevancy than Google. I guess that is already reflected in their respective share prices.
Harold
Harold,
Value of a company is share price times shares. Google has far fewer shares than Microsoft. The absolute share price by itself is immaterial. Microsoft is worth considerably more than Google. About $210B vs. $130B.
Posted by: James Yeh | June 16, 2009 at 04:55 PM