Google Search, commonly referred to as Google Web Search or just Google, is a web

search engine owned by Google Inc. It is the most-used search engine on the World
Wide Web,[4] handling more than three billion searches each day.[5][6] As of February
2015 it is the most used search engine in the US with 64.5% market share.[7]
The order of search on Google's search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank
called a "PageRank". Google Search provides many different options for customized
search, using Boolean operators such as: exclusion ("-xx"), alternatives ("xx OR yy OR
zz"), and wildcards ("Winston * Churchill" returns "Winston Churchill", "Winston Spencer
Churchill", etc.)[8] The same and other options can be specified in a different way on an
Advanced Search page.
The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in publicly accessible documents
offered by web servers, as opposed to other data, such as images or data contained in
databases. It was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.[9] Google
Search provides several features beyond searching for words.[10] These include
synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie
showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for
numbers, dates, and some specific forms, including ranges, [11] prices, temperatures,
money and measurement unit conversions, calculations, package tracking, patents, area
codes,[10] and language translation. In June 2011 Google introduced "Google Voice
Search" to search for spoken, rather than typed, words.[12] In May 2012 Google introduced
a Knowledge Graph semantic searchfeature in the U.S.
Analysis of the frequency of search terms may indicate economic, social and health
trends.[13] Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google have been shown
to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels, and provide the information
faster than traditional reporting methods and surveys.
Competitors of Google include Baidu and Soso.com in China; Naver.com and Daum
Communications in South Korea; Yandex in Russia; Seznam.cz in the Czech
Republic;Yahoo! in Japan, Taiwan and the US, as well as Bing and DuckDuckGo.[14] Some
smaller search engines offer facilities not available with Google, e.g. not storing any
private or tracking information; one such search engine is Ixquick.
Contents
[hide]

1 Search
o

1.1 PageRank

1.2 Search products

1.3 Non-indexable data

1.4 Google optimization

1.5 Universal search

2 Functionality
o

2.1 Search syntax

2.2 Query expansion

2.3 "I'm Feeling Lucky"

2.4 Rich snippets

2.5 Special features

2.6 Search options

2.7 Error messages

2.7.1 January 2009 malware bug

2.8 Google Doodles

2.9 Google Caffeine

2.10 Conversational search (OK Google)

2.11 Hummingbird update

3 Privacy
o

3.1 Encrypted search

3.2 FTC Fines

4 Instant Search

5 Redesign

6 Mobile app

7 International

8 Search products

9 Energy consumption

10 Possible misuse of search results

11 See also

12 References

13 Further reading

14 External links

Search[edit]
PageRank[edit]
Main article: PageRank
Google's rise to success was in large part due to a
patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given
search string.[15] When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed
BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance.
Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search
engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the
search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were
within each resulting page. The PageRank algorithm instead analyzes humangenerated links assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are
themselves likely to be important. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages,
based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. PageRank is
thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance. In addition to PageRank,
Google, over the years, has added many other secret criteria for determining the ranking
of pages on result lists, reported to be over 250 different indicators,[16][17] the specifics of
which are kept secret to keep spammers at bay and help Google maintain an edge over
its competitors globally.
In a potential hint of Google's future direction for their Search algorithm, Eric Schmidt,
Google's then chief executive, said in a 2007 interview with the Financial Times: "The
goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do
tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'".[18] Schmidt reaffirmed this during a 2010
interview with the Wall Street Journal: "I actually think most people don't want Google to
answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." [19]
In 2013 the European Commission found that Google Search favored Google's own
products, instead of offering consumers the best result for their needs.[20] In February
2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would
favor mobile friendly over other websites. Nearly 60% of Google's online search
traffic comes from mobile phones. Google wants its users to have access to premium
quality websites. Those websites which lack a mobile friendly interface would
be demoted and it is expected that this update will cause a massive shake-up of ranks.
Business who fail to update their websites accordingly could see a massive dip in their
regular websites traffic.[21]