Are you on Google ? Do you exist ?

Today I have to tell you that I was wondering about a common phrase that I keep hearing around me : “If you are not on Google, you don’t exist”. I believe that the situation itself that led to this kind of saying is alarming.

And exactly what is that situation ? The supremacy that Google has on our world ? Extremists talk about this world in terms like the one above. In fact, Google has managed to gain impressive brand awareness in the last few years, like no other search engine has. I mean, yes, I can remember the times when AltaVista was the main stream search engine, but, still, people had heard and used other search engines along with it.

Nowadays, most college youngsters have no idea of any other search engine existence. We all have google.com as a home page, I surely admit to it, but I can still type some other search engines addresses from my mind (ask.com, webcrawler.com, dogpile.com etc) if I am not satisfied with the Google results.

People who have and know no other alternative can be easily manipulated. I have to confess that I am not so interested in the WWW, like other people are, and have no idea about many things. But I am also aware of my power to decide : what to search for, how to spend my time, what things are important etc.

So, I searched for the method on how Google works. It is now a trademark and it’s called PageRank. This is used by Google to determine what page is important and how relevant it is for the user. It is very simple thinking : if web page A sends you to a page B, that means page B has a popularity vote from page A. Pages who have many votes likes this, receive a higher PageRank. But, it is not only that. PageRank analyzes what kind of pages link one another and if an important page votes you, then you also get a higher PageRank.

This method has had it's share of discussion ,which I am surely not going to do now. It is not the only one working for Google, but is the most used one.


So, that's it. I just wanted to know how this machine works and how it divides the world into people who exist - a.k.a. you find them on google - and people who don't. The rest is up to you to think upon.