{"id":68159,"date":"2022-11-20T09:37:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-20T09:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morningtrain.dk\/what-is-google\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T06:35:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T06:35:56","slug":"what-is-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morningtrain.dk\/en\/what-is-google\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Google?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Digitalisering<\/p>

20. november 2022<\/p>

What is Google?<\/h1><\/div>

Google is a so-called \u201csearch engine\u201d, which in practice means it is a website with several million robots trying to find the content you are searching for. Imagine a gigantic archive consisting of everything on the internet, with small robots rushing around trying to match it with the relevant results. <\/p><\/div>\n\n

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\n Indhold\n <\/p>\n \n Kort og godt\n <\/a>\n \n Betydningen\n <\/a>\n \n S\u00e5dan fungerer det\n <\/a>\n \n Andre s\u00f8gemaskiner\n <\/a>\n \n Google er f\u00f8rende\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n

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Google is a so-called \u201csearch engine\u201d, which in practice means it is a website with several million robots trying to find the content you are searching for.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine a gigantic archive consisting of everything on the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of an angry librarian, the archive is populated by millions of small robots rushing around with words and fragments of sentences\u2014and trying to match them with the relevant results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many search engines in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The search function on elgiganten.dk is also a search engine, for example\u2014it just searches only within results on Elgiganten\u2019s own website (and anything else would, of course, be pointless).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google\u2019s search engine works in exactly the same way; it just searches across everything with a broadband connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One might be tempted to say that Google has become the nerve centre of our online activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What does the word \u2018Google\u2019 mean?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are roughly 400,000,000 websites, each with a vast number of subpages, images, videos, and much more.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just imagine a website like Fyens.dk, which alone has more than 1 million subpages\u2014and Fyens.dk is only one of the 400 million websites on the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you multiply these numbers together, you suddenly understand why Google was, at the time, an absolute necessity.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because how on earth would you otherwise be able to find anything among trillions of web pages?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This observation also explains the name \u201cGoogle\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google comes from the word \u2018googol\u2019, which is a mathematical term for an astronomically large number with 100 zeros.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea behind the name was to illustrate the enormous amount of content Google handles for users.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonus info: <\/span><\/b>A googol is actually a number used in practice: It is primarily used in contexts where distances in the universe are calculated.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So how does Google work?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Many have tried to answer this question!<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All SEO agencies<\/a> and experts have an idea, but the truth is that, in reality, we can only make qualified, empirically grounded guesses.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because Google has never opened up and said: \u201cThis is exactly how it works.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, Google is happy to tell us what its focus is, and from that you can infer and calculate\u2014forward or backward\u2014how things actually work.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One example is that Google has always said that speed is important. \u201cBut how fast should my site be?\u201d, you ask yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you use Google\u2019s own speed tool, you find that Google calculates a website\u2019s speed based on visiting the site on an old device via a slow 3G connection. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay\u2014so from that we can infer that your website is fast enough if the experience on a slow 3G connection is reasonable.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this way, you can work out a wide range of the metrics Google cares about.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, you could also say that Google works like this<\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Google matches the search term with the web pages that, from a linguistic perspective, resemble it the most. It then ranks the results found in an order based on a number of factors: \u2705 How easy is the website to understand? <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2705 Is there a lot of traffic on the site in general?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2705 Is this a popular result for others?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2705 Does the page resemble something you would personally click on? <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2705<\/span> Does the website seem trustworthy, and do others recommend the website in question?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and many other metrics.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So Google simply does not spend most of its time finding the results.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That part is easy enough.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is simply a matter of whether the search term appears on the website.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difficult part\u2014and what takes Google the most time\u2014is understanding how<\/b> the results should be prioritised and ranked relative to one another. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there other major search engines besides Google?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Yes, there are countless search engines.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the fact that people talk about \u201cto Google\u201d tells us everything we need to know about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google holds roughly 95 percent of the market<\/a>, and all other search engines are merely trying to copy Google, because it is and remains the search engine that has come the furthest with its project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft\u2019s search engine, Bing, comes in a respectable second place globally. But even they have shown their hand as the smaller challenger. In Bing\u2019s advertising tool, they have literally chosen to include an \u201cimport from Google Ads<\/a>\u201d feature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why is Google\u2019s search engine so much better?<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another good question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the answer is actually extremely simple: DATA!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google simply has access to more data than its competitors, and it has incorporated it brilliantly into its search engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, Google has developed a huge number of new products, many of which are completely free to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people know tools such as:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n