Links as votes
The older AltaVista search engine looked mainly at words on a page, which was easy to game. PageRank treated every link as a vote of confidence. A page linked from important pages is important.
From search engine to giant
Google makes money from ads next to search results. It added Gmail (2004), Maps (2005), YouTube (bought 2006), Android and Chrome. Its parent company has been called Alphabet since 2015.
Search and AI
Since 2024 Google has shown AI-generated summaries above the results. Many people ask chatbots directly. Websites now wonder how visitors will find them when the answer appears right in the search engine.