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Google, the largest search engine in the world

Google indexes billions of pages every week. Here is a plain explanation of how it works, what SEO means inside it, and where it goes next.

Martijn Co4 min read

Google search results on a screen

Google is the number one search engine for images, videos and web pages. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It still defines what the rest of the search market reacts to.

Revenue comes from advertising. The free services around it (Gmail, Google Maps) make it sticky. The name itself is a misspelling of "googol", which is 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google indexes billions of pages per week

The index contains billions of pages right now. Google crawls millions of websites every day and adds them, which is how it can deliver fast and relevant results.

If you want more traffic from it:

  • Do keyword research to learn how your audience actually searches
  • Create content that is relevant to your business
  • Add valuable links to other sites
  • Submit your site to Google

What does Google SEO mean?

SEO covers both the technical and the creative side of search. The goal is qualified visitors who are searching on terms close to your offer. Linkbuilding is one of the techniques that pushes your pages higher.

Backlinks are Google's original foundation. The algorithm relies on math and statistics, and backlink analysis is core to how it ranks pages. Quality links signal credibility. To earn them you need content worth linking to.

The future of Google

Google is under more competition than at any point in the last decade. TikTok behaves like a discovery engine for younger audiences. Bing and DuckDuckGo serve specific segments. AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity intercept queries that used to land on Google.

Rising ad costs threaten the profit model. Every user that moves to an alternative engine is direct revenue loss. The continuous feature shipping (AI Overviews, Search Generative Experience) is a defensive move to keep users on the page.