For a long time Google's algorithms have remained a mystery to us all. Well, not exactly all of us, since Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and a handful of techies at Google know the 'secrets'. What are these algorithms? What do they do? How do they work?
To understand the importance of Google's algorithms, you must first understand what happens when a term is entered into Google's search engine. When you search for a term, Google's robots scan the web to find web pages that contain information pertaining to the term that you entered. These pages are entered into an index. They are then analyzed and sorted by the algorithms. The page that contains the most relevant information is ranked first. Subsequent pages are ranked according to the relevancy of the information they contain. All this, as you know, happens in a few microseconds.
As you can imagine, Google's algorithms do an unfathomably massive job of analyzing millions of web pages and ranking them according to the information they contain. Considering that Google gets several hundred million queries every day, you can imagine the kind of work put in to these algorithms.
Apart from the developers, no one really knows how Google's algorithms work. It is, however, well known that the search engine uses a number of contextual signals (more than 200) to rank web pages that contain relevant information. These signals include anchor text, web page title, location, external link popularity, diversity of link sources, and many, many more. Using these signals, the algorithms are able to rank web pages in the right order.
Google changes its algorithms continuously, making sure people receive the most relevant results when they search the web for information. In 2007 alone, Google tweaked its algorithms more than 400 times.
Interestingly, there is absolutely no human involvement with respect to the results generated by Google's algorithms. If a Google query for some reason returned irrelevant items, the results could not be manually reordered. The guys at Google would have to analyze the algorithms, check for the weaknesses causing the problem, and find a solution. This explains why the developers spend so much time tweaking the algorithms. It helps to ensure that we receive the best results on a consistent basis.
Someone once described Google's algorithms as 'a work in progress'. It is possibly the best description as these algorithms are dynamic in every sense of the word. As you are reading this article, a developer at Google is probably tweaking algorithms. This kind of explains why Google's competitors have such a tough time catching up with it.
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http://EzineArticles.com/?Unraveling-Googles-Algorithms&id=4133332] Unraveling Google's Algorithms