Taking a Closer Look at How Google Works

With all the speculation about how much Yahoo is worth to Microsoft, or how much Yahoo would be worth if it outsourced its search-advertising platform to Google, it seems like a good opportunity to clarify how Google's system works. After all, it is Google's search and advertising empire that analysts believe to be the biggest threat to both Microsoft and Yahoo.

I wrote a story last week about some online marketers who thought a Microsoft-Yahoo combination would provide an alternative to Google. I've since spoken with a few folks at Google to get a better understanding of the mechanics behind its successful Web search and search-ad systems.

There are three ways for Web sites and companies to get online visibility through Google--Search, Adwords and Adsense--and each one works differently.

Its Search platform gave Google its early fame by making sense of the information on the Web. Once a search query is entered, Google's "spiders" crawl through all the information they can access on the Web and ranks the most relevant pages. The most meaningful factors involved in determining relevance are how many other sites link to a particular page and how many times the query terms appear on the page. Read More>>