History and Evolution of Google

Google introduction

Google the most popular search engine was founded by Larry Page and Sergei Neil while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. Google now plays a crucial role in the world with its reliable internet services. The steps involved in optimizing a website in Google include crawling, catching and indexing. In crawling Google will scan new webpages. Google takes the snapshot of this webpage which is called catching and then this snapshot is stored in the database where related topics are stored and this is called indexing. For better crawling, Google provided their secret file containing optimization method to the webmasters. This improved the awareness of webmasters about search engine optimization. This also helped Google to crawl better and gain the trust of its users.

Evolution of Google search engine

The evolution of Google search engine started with a niche search engine which was a content specific search engine. But it had to face the problem of keyword stuffing. Then link specific search engine was introduced where the webpage with more links from other sites was provided with more credibility. But it too had to face similar problems. The link sellers came into the scene with the offer of selling links. Then Google came up with the idea of page rank. Page rank is quality link specific and here more the trust value the more is the page rank.

It was followed by link juice where the power or equity was passed from one website to other sites via links from external or internal sources and then referential links were excused from this passing of equity.

 By the time Google search engine became a hit, Google introduced Google  AdWords which was an advertisement program and which followed PPC(Paper Click) policy. It was then followed by Google  AdSense and this forced Google from updating in fear of revenue loss. In 2009, Google improved the quality of the search engine by making it more interactive. The user interaction was analyzed by Google to provide credibility to the websites. They created data centers where all the dates related to user interaction with the website was stored. These collected data was updated periodically. Google reduced the value of websites if they had poor interaction with the user. In 2010, social media authority was introduced in such a way that websites with more interactions in social media got more credibility. The authority of people making interaction is also a depending factor.

Google Updates

Google performed many updates to improve the quality of the search engine. Google Panda update which was also called farmer update was performed against content spamming. The most popular panda 4 update on May 20, 21 2014 removed many websites which performed plagiarism. Then panda was added as a permanent filtrate in the Google algorithm. The websites caught for plagiarism was stored to the sandbox. 

The next important update was penguin update which was against link spamming. Link spamming includes link selling, link farming, wiki spamming, comment spamming etc. Penguin update also caught sites that did unlimited guest blogging which was also considered as link spamming. Guest blogging allowed users to post in other user's blogs which in turn gave credibility to the former one. Later this leads to link spamming due to limited guest blogging.
Next update made by Google was Pirates update that was against copying digital components like images, text, video etc. illegally. This update allowed the users to register complains against copying of digital components in DMCA (Digital Millennium Cooperate Act) within the Google.
The Pigeon update was developed to help business sites which require a local audience. These websites were required to perform local SEO in order to be visible locally to others. Localizing steps included: inserting to Google my business, presence in local directories, placing the address in the website clearly and Geo-tagging.
Humming Bird update followed semantic search results and is provided with the knowledge graph which enhanced the quality of the search engine. The problem with this update is that Google can be easily misleading and create wrong judgment which will create mistakes in knowledge graph. This update was later advanced to Rank Brain update which used artificial intelligence for a better result for each user.
With the popularity of handy devices, Google was tempted to introduce the Mobile Friendly update. This update allowed the mobile-friendly websites to be marked as mobile friendly and they were given more preference when compared to normal sites.

Aparna