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(Google, Mountain View, CA,
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students. In 1996, they developed their "BackRub" search engine, named after its unique page ranking method (explained below). With investments from Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim and others, the company was founded in September 1998, and BackRub was launched as the Google search engine in 1999.
Google acquired the Usenet discussion groups from Deja.com in 2001 and renamed them Google Groups. In 2006, Google surprised everyone by acquiring YouTube, the most popular video sharing site on the Web. See Usenet, Deja.com and YouTube.
Google It!
The name Google was chosen to represent the gigantic amount of material available on the Web. It comes from "googol;" the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name became a verb. To Google something means to search the Web for it. See googol.
The Clean Screen
From the start, Google set itself apart from the other search sites. Instead of its home page laden with graphics that took a long time to download in the days of analog modems, the Google home page contained only a logo and search box. The page downloaded quickly, and users felt they were getting a faster result even before they started searching. Even today, Google's home page is sparse: no news, no ads; only a handful of text links to its huge number of services and applications.
Behind Google's home page lies a sophisticated search engine. The company streamlines all of its several hundred thousand PCs to provide the most search engine power with the least amount of energy and heat dissipation. Using its own self-healing software, Google's Web indexes are mirrored around the globe, and any PC can fail without disruption.
PageRank and Backlinks - A Different Approach
Called "PageRank," Google introduced a unique concept of determining which pages rank the highest in the results list. When you do a Google search, the pages with the most links pointing to them from other sites, known as "backlinks," are placed higher up in the list because they are considered more popular and thus more relevant. In addition, the sites with the backlinks are themselves analyzed for backlinks to determine how popular they are. For example, a site might rank higher if 50 very popular sites link to it rather than 500 unpopular sites. See Google applications, Google Doodle, Google bomb and Googleplex.
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For the backlink functionality in Wikipedia, see Help:What links here.
Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.[1]
Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
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Search engine rankings
Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.[2] Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.
Websites often employ various search engine optimization techniques to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website. Some methods are free for use by everyone whereas some methods like linkbaiting requires quite a bit of planning and marketing to work. Some websites stumble upon "linkbaiting" naturally; the sites that are the first with a tidbit of 'breaking news' about a celebrity are good examples of that. When "linkbait" happens, many websites will link to the 'baiting' website because there is information there that is of extreme interest to a large number of people.
There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable.[3] If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable 'editorial vote' for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage. Another important factor is the anchor text of the backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of a webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.
Increasingly, inbound links are being weighed against link popularity and originating context. This transition is reducing the notion of one link, one vote in SEO, a trend proponents[who?] hope will help curb linkspam as a whole.
Technical
When HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was designed, there was no explicit mechanism in the design to keep track of backlinks in software, as this carried additional logistical and network overhead.
Most Content management systems include features to track backlinks, provided the external site linking in sends notification to the target site. Most wiki systems include the capability of determining what pages link internally to any given page, but do not track external links to any given page.
Most commercial search engines provide a mechanism to determine the number of backlinks they have recorded to a particular web page. For example, Google can be searched using link:www.wikipedia.org to find the number of pages on the Web pointing to http://www.wikipedia.org/. Google only shows a small fraction of the number of links pointing to a site. It credits many more backlinks than it shows for each website[citation needed].
Other mechanisms have been developed to track backlinks between disparate webpages controlled by organizations that aren't associated with each other. The most notable example of this is TrackBacks between blogs.
See also
- Link farms
- Methods of website linking
- PageRank
- Search Engine Optimization
- Linkback
- Search engine results page
References
- ^ Lennart Björneborn and Peter Ingwersen (2004). "Toward a Basic Framework for Webometrics". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55 (14): 1216–1227. doi:10.1002/asi.20077. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/109594194/ABSTRACT.
- ^ Google's overview of PageRank
- ^ "Does Backlink Quality Matter?". Adgooroo. 2010-04-21. http://www.adgooroo.com/backlink_quality.php. Retrieved 2010-04-21.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
