Why the emphasis on Google?
In a nutshell, Google is the one to beat. Any broad search study will show Google dominating
market share, although different tests disagree on how much. In April 2007,
comScore showed Google leading the pack with 49.7 percent; Hitwise, from the same
period, attributed them a 64.13 percent share. None of the competition, at least at the
time of this book, is even close.4 To add insult to injury, Google also powers the search
results of other major websites and software vendors: browsers such as Firefox and Opera,
plus other search engines such as Excite, AOL, Netscape, and more.
Google basically reinvented the way search engines work. Just about every other provider
has modeled their techniques after the giant, which is why the effort of optimizing a site
for Google often cascades to competing search engines. Their innovative approach boils
down to ranking results by link popularity. (This does not preclude link quality; in fact, the
quality of the link, which we??™ll explore in this chapter, has just as much influence.)
Because Google continues to adjust its algorithms to produce better results, the world
keeps coming back to find reliable answers.
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