Google Chrome taking hold

Although Internet browsing experience is dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox, Google Chrome is showing signs of starting to take hold. If you have a pc and want to try a different browsing experience, go and download your free copy of Google Chrome.

There are some neat features including an integrated url and search box. If you browse web pages with a lot of Java script, Chrome also makes the experience super fast. Some early stats are showing that as many as 1.5% of users now use Chrome. Go and take a look..

How Search Engines Work

When it comes to finding information, and promoting your business, Search engines are the most important aspect of the Internet. The best-known, and most frequently used, search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN and, in the English speaking world, these account for around 95% of the monthly searches.

Search engines allow you to find documents and resources on the web by matching your search keywords with the closest, and most important, matches in their database.

The easiest way to visualise a search engine is to think of it as a traditional card index system where records are kept alphabetically. All search engines work in much the same way and they are based on three main pieces of software

1. The Spider
The spider ‘crawls’ the Internet, moving from site to site, collecting information about each and every page that it visits. Spiders have to visit billions of web-pages every hour so they tend not to spend too long on each site. They collect information about the content of each page – words and pictures, which sites link to each page and to where each page links.

2. The Index
The Index organises all the content that the spiders collect and files it into some structure so that it can then be easily retrieved. The more information The Spider can collect about a certain web-page, the more chance The Index has of correctly filing that page. Search engine indices are massive with the Google index alone containing an estimated 25 billion pages.

3. The Search
The Search is the consumer facing interface that all Internet users are familiar with. It’s the simple looking rectangular box where you type your search query and then ‘web search’. The Search function matches your search query against pages listed within the search engines index, ranking the most appropriate phrase first, the next second etc.

There is a further search engine functions that is responsible for the growth in Google from being a small search engine started by two mathematicians to being a Fortune 100 company in less than 10 years. This function is the Pay Per Click search where you can pay to be at the top of search results for your chosen key search words. We’ll take a look at Pay Per Click in more detail in a future article,

This explanation is a massive simplification of a hugely complex machine that processes billions of web pages in a fraction of a second every time you do a search. If you run a business, getting towards the top of search results for your search terms can mean the difference between make or break.

Google alerts!

If you have a special interest, a hobby or are involved in research in any way and you want to keep on top of what's being posted on the internet, Google alerts is the service for you.

Let's say your area of interest if 'weight loss'. When you sign up to Google alerts and enter the selected phrase 'weight loss', Google will notify you, by email, every time it finds a new page with reference to your keyphrase. It saves you hours of researching and keeps you bang up-to-date with what's being published on the Internet.

Give it a go. It's free!

Google's Keyword Tool

Following the demise of the Overture keyword tool, that many people used as their starting point for keyword research, there has been a distinct lack of some suitable, free, alternative.

Well, that's all changed now; enter Google's search based keyword tool. It currently looks and functions a bit American centric but it's a great starting point and we're sure that, with the UK being Google's second largest market for their Adwords program, a more UK centric version will become available soon.