Google

Short history

In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford published “The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web,” which describes the methodology of Google’s ranking algorithm, PageRank. Google’s PageRank algorithm determines the value of a website according to the number of inlinks received by a webpage. The algorithm was inspired by the academic publications’ citation system, in which the value of an academic publication is determined by the number of quotations received by the journal’s articles. In May 2000 Google released the first 10 language versions: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. There are now 146 language versions. In June 2005 Google introduces personalized search. According to the official Google Blog, other parts of the ranking algorithm are: “language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).” Human evaluators also participate in the page ranking ( http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/30-Google-Confirms-Eval.google.com-Exists.html).

'How' it works

“PageRank is a global ranking of all web pages, regardless of their content, based solely on their location in the web’s graph structure” (Larry Page et al 1999: 15)

In addition to the ‘global’ PageRank for the organization of web pages, Google introduced measures they use to target content nationally. The engine targets content nationally by geo locative indicators, which are technical and textual indicators for web content. The search engine uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website, or a part of a website:

1. ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names) Google uses this as a strong sign that a website is explicitly for a certain country or Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs
2. Server location (through the IP address of the server). However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so Google tries not to rely on the server location alone.
3. Other signals. Including links from other local sites and textual signals, such as local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency.

Why it 'works' for Iranians

Google has 64.9% market share in Iran according to marktheglobe.com.
There’s no google.ir but there’s Persian language search.

Query design

The tool Generate national is used to query Google for an Iranian web. As mentioned earlier, Google does not provide a Local Domain search engine for Iran (Google.ir). However, it does provide access to an Iranian web in the Advanced Search, through the Region Search setting. The tool generate national makes use of google.com for the ccTLD queries and google.com region search for the gTLD queries.

Google.com is queried for:

site:co.ir; site: ac.ir; site:.gov.ir; site:.id.ir; site:.net.ir; site:.org.ir; site:.sch.ir; site:.ir+-site:.co.ir+-site:.ac.ir+-site:.gov.ir+-site:.id.ir+-site:.net.ir+-site:.org.ir+-site:.sch.ir

Google.com Region Search is queried for:

site:.com; site:.org; site:.net; site:.info; site:.biz; site:.edu

Characterization of (national) web it outputs

language it outputs

site locations

audience

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