What are the reasons behind Google popularity?
By:
HiwotAsefa and Wendwesen Endale
Posted
date: 28/07/2017
Introduction
Different search
engines enable to retrieve information from the huge collection of resources on
the web. Currently there are more than 2500 search engines worldwide with a
different aim and types. What so ever the type of the search engines, it should
consider the ways for user satisfaction for existence. As a matter of fact
peoples might not shocked when they heard Google is the predominate search
engine now a days. Google has become a part of our social culture. Over many
years, Google has gained popularity in the society of most parts of the world.Google
is the most widely used search engine on the internet today. It receives over 3
billion online searches on a daily basis. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September, 1998 (Baloch, n.d.). Since its founding,
Google has made much advancement in the search engine field. It has been mentioned in many TV shows and
movies and is considered to be a part of our search culture. It has become
common for someone to say, “Just Google it” to read more about a topic.
But
what makes Google popular?
It is clear that when
we say Google is popular, we can say that it gets acceptance with its users or
the users are satisfied with it. Since user satisfaction is one of the
indicators of user’s achievement of information need. User satisfaction may be
calculated by the user’s intention to repeatedly visiting the search engine.
There are a lots of
survey based attempts that shares the popularity of Google among different
search engines. But most of them are just surveys conducted by including online
users about their preference about search engines priority. Based on most
surveys conducted many users believe that Google is the quickest and most
reliable search engine for many reasons. According toCharis,writer
of the relaibalesoft.net on the top 10 search engines based on 2017
survey, Google search engine holds the
first place in search with a stunning difference of 43% from second in place
Bing (Chris, 2017). A study done
in 2012 also showed that 69.5% of users’ searches were done using Google, with
Bing coming in second place at 25%. Google is also the main search engine used
on mobile devices and tablets.
But
those survey results
are general which are based on online user surveys and don’t give the technical
and main reasons for Goggle popularity. Since there are number of factors that
affect user satisfaction, it is better to see Google’s popularity in relation
to its user satisfaction as user relies on search engine for information need.
Here below we tried to
see Google with respect to some common criteria’s of user satisfaction in using
search engines fromSunita andEla (2011) about factors affecting user
satisfaction with search engines since most of the survey opinions can be also
part of the criteria. Based on their findings higher satisfaction can be
achieved with issues like providing user friendly interface, fast response
time, good coverage of Web, Diversity of the services. Further there is
evidence that diversity of content and discovery of new pages/content will play
an important role towards user satisfactions. Let’s see Google with respect to some
of the criteria’s mentioned.
A.User friendliness (User Interface):-The effectiveness of search engine is largely
determined by the user friendliness of the interface and the interaction between
the users and the information technology (Sunita andEla, 2011).Here if we try
to examine yahoo with Google even we can understand that the Google user
interface is easy and user friendly for the users.The Google homepage is very
simple, easy to use, and loads quickly. Google shows fewer ads on its homepage
than its competitors, Bing and Yahoo. The ads Google shows are more related to
its users’ interests unless Google don’t advertise on the user page. Displaying
fewer ads gives Google an advantage over Yahoo and Bing because its pages are
easier to read.
B.Response Time: User may get easily frustrated if
theresponse time is large. John and Chris (2000) showed in theresearch that
slow system response time leads to dissatisfactionof users.It provides users
with better results than any other search engine and can find a lot of
information quickly.Caching is an effective technique insearch engines for
improving response time, reducing the loadon query processors, and improving
network bandwidth utilization (Ricardo etal.,
2007).Google’s servers are typically much faster than many web servers; we can
often access a page’s cached version faster than the page itself.Basically
every result of our search includes a Cached link. Clicking on that link takes
you to the Google cached version of that particular web page, instead of taking
you to the current version of the page.This also increases the response time in
Google.
C. Diversity of Services: Diversity is related to the breadth of the
content and services. People have diverse goalswhen they issue the same query
to a search engine.
One of the advantages
of Google comes from its all in one feature. That is there are Gmail for mail
service, Google News for news stories, Google Blog Search for searching blog
posts, Google Images for finding pictures, Google Video and YouTube for finding
video content, Google Local Search for results for finding local business
information, Google Scholar for finding journal articles, and Google Books for
searching the full contents of millions of current and out of print books.
Google has begun to merge these products together in the main Web search – it’s called Universal Search. Beside
this, Androidwhich is the
most popular and free operating system for Mobile Phones and
other devices
D.Freshness: Freshness of content in search results is
also animportant aspect for user satisfaction. In measuring searchengine
quality, quality of search results is one of the measuresto be considered.Because
of the growth of the web, the number of old pages that no longer change has
also increased drastically. Search engines need to find ways to show to the
user pages that meet user’s up-to-datedness criteria.Google Searches Billions of URLs. Google crawls and indexes many
web pages, thus increasing the likelihood of its returning what you’re seeking.
Due to the well-known
crawler in Google called “Google bot” it is easy for crawlers to look at web pages
and follow links on those pages, so that to add any new information on the web.
E.Relevance: When user issues a query to a search engine
and receives an ordered list of results, User Satisfaction depends on how much
the retrieved results met user’s information need (Ali, etal., 2009).Google is extremely good at ranking sites in order
of their relevance to users. It places value on sites that can link to other
pages with similar information. The more popular sites that link to your page,
the better the chance that your website contains useful information. As a result due to its page rank algorithm it
becomes very effective in relevance judgment.
F. Extra Services: The modern web search engines provideextra
services like spelling suggestions, current news, images,local results, stock
charts, etc. to users. For the evaluation ofthe effectiveness of search engines
to satisfy users’ needs, theseextra elements are very important to consider.This
popular search engine also lets computer users have free access to their rising
YouTube channel. Over the last few years, Google has become a hot spot for
people who enjoy watching and posting original videos on the internet. As an
example of this growth, Google has branched out by creating their own email
system named Gmail which is the most widely used web-based email provider with
over 425 million active users worldwide (Baloch, n.d.). This is the most
famous feature of Google that make it popular which is commonly used on cell
phones and other new mobile. On top of this Google Maps is a very nice service,
which can be used as both a desktop and mobile map service. Google Maps lets
people view street maps and images shot from a satellite view and also gives
them a street view perspective from up to four different types of transportation
(auto, public, bicycle, on foot.). Such services are not that much available
with other search engines in to their own services.
Conclusion
Generally apart from
the mentioned criteria’s for the success of search engines there are also other
factors have significant impact on user satisfaction like easy navigation,
appropriate use of graphics and high degree of interactivity are more likely to
attract users (Sunita and Ela, 2011).There might also several human
factorswhich may contribute to the overall level of user satisfaction.Here I
tried on to see the reasons for Google popularity from some of the mentioned
criteria’s.
Though other search
engines are also excellent for finding information, Google is the most popular
search engine in many countries in the world.
As a result of
different survey results and from statistics we can claim that Google is the
popular search engine now days in most countries of the worlds and it can also
satisfy the users of Google with its plenty of services offered in line with
the searching features.Known for its easy to use interface and highly relevant
results, Google also places heavy emphasis on helping consumers and a variety of
professionals find high-quality information (Francesco andEugen, 2015).
Even if Google
resulted good progress in different aspects of search engines, there are still challenges
faced that need future improvements. As per our understanding the Google
crawler needs to be improved regards to updating and checking the index files
availability. Some times when a user browse some webpages Google retrieves the
resources url which are moved permanently or deleted which leads to
dissatisfaction of a user. Additionally Google sometimes still yield results
with little relevance on top. For instance searching for reviews will more than
likely produce more hits on marketing content or products.
In line with this when
a new page is created and content is added, it still lacks speed to crawl the
newly created documents and retrieved as per the request. For instance I tried
to post this document in Google blogger but when I search the documents with
the title it takes days to crawler and index the content for the user request.
Beside this, since
Google is more recall oriented, improvements need to be done on the precision
aspect to satisfy the user needs in a better way. Such issues are Google
company expert’s homework to help Google popular in the future as it is now.
References
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