by josh garner
In my line of work as an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist, I hear time and time again, “I want to rank in Google.” Everybody who has a website concerns themselves with ranking in the number 1 search engine more than any other. My personal feelings of simultaneous love and hate for Google aside, I often ask myself “why is Google number 1?”
Google is a great place to be. A listing on page one from the result of a competitive search term can literally mean millions of hits to a site per month, maybe more. The name “Google” has even become a verb in the online community; “hey, just Google it.” But how on ‘Google Earth’ did they get there?
I saw an episode of one of my favorite shows last night, and a character quoted an inside-the-E.R. saying. “Surgery is 90% skill, and 10% luck.” This made me think about Google. Granted, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are incredibly brilliant and they had an amazing idea; create a search engine that would base it’s ranking primarily on the inbound links to a site. But there are plenty of other ingenious ideas out there, and plenty of them never leave the minds or garages of their creators. As a matter of fact, the two budding pioneers really intended to partner with a larger company like Yahoo!, but were turned down by founder David Filo stating that “When it’s fully developed and scalable, let’s talk again.” This turned out to be a bad move, but that’s another article I’m sure. It wasn’t until they searched for “angel investors” that they started to see any light, and a lot of that fell into their laps.
Google tends to attract very great minds with the treatment of their employees. Larry Page is often quoted stating that “no human worker should be more than 150 feet away from a food source.” Which is a pretty easy standard to meet, what with the 11 gourmet restaurants (all offering free food and drinks) in the Mountain View, CA. headquarters lovingly referred to as Googleplex. The perks include a $500 voucher for takeout food after the birth of a child, a $5,000 subsidy to buy a hybrid car, and a $2,000 bonus for referring a new employee. Unfortunately, you have to pay your own $30 to get an on-site massage. Pfft....that’s Corporate America, I guess.
With such an alluring workplace, it’s easy to employ those that want to work out of passion and not for monetary gain. This passionate group strives to create some of the best applications on the Internet. They have no problems working the extra hours and they are more than willing to go the extra mile.
Google has a motto “Don’t be evil,” that is outlined in their code of conduct. They have this perception of actually trying to make the Internet better. They often buy companies that offer products, make those products better, then offer them for free. I am, in fact, writing this in a Google Document, an online application matching the versatility of Microsoft’s Word, with the ability to share the document online so that myself and others could collaborate. This is comforting to the idealistic America that gets tired of seeing the Big Company beating on the little guys (we are the little guys, by the way). As a society, we like to believe that there is a large company out there that is doing good for our community without the greed, as is shown time and time again.
I test thousands of searches and results per week as part of my job. Unfortunately, Google fails all too often to produce a “relevant” site to my search criteria. There are times when Yahoo! or MSN produces a better search experience. They could have gotten to where they are by one of the points above, a combination of them, or perhaps something we don’t get to see as the public, but alas, Google is number 1. There are plenty of competitors that come close, but they just don’t seem to get things right at the right time.
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