How Search Engines Work - Google is a Restaurant
A good friend and business aquintance of mine once explained to me how search engines are like restaurants and here is why.
The following story follows three people:
1. The Customer - you
2. The restaurant owner - Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc
3. The Chef(s) - website owners/operators
The customer (you) is hungry for knowledge/entertainment/information and so you decide that you are going to check out available restaurants. You have many choices but for this story we will use the Google restaurant, the Yahoo restaurant and the Bing restaurant. For the sake of expedition, let's say you chose to go to the famed Google restaurant.
So you arrive at the Google restaurant and there is the owner (Google) ready to seat you and take your order. "I'll have search engine optimization in Niagara please". This is what you are craving today. "Coming right up" Google replies. Now the owner runs to the back of the kitchen to tell his many chefs what the latest customer has just ordered.
Remember, the chefs are all of the websites out there who are capable of delivering this particular meal. Google now asks them "who can deliver the best meal for my customer?". Naturally everyone raises their hands (or all of us who want to be ranked under this particular search, or meal if you will). Google then takes note of everyone who tossed their perverbial chef hat in the ring and begins to analyze each chefs meal. They look at the chefs cooking history. They look at the presenattion of the chefs meal. They do a quick taste test of the chefs hearty content soup. The list goes on. In the end, the chefs meals have now been ranked and presented to the customer one by one. Google has put their best meals at the front of the line.
The customer now samples the meals. He will not sample all of them but odds are he will sample at least a few until he has found one that suits his tastes. Throughout this, Google has been keenly observing the customer, watching which meals were passed upon and which ones were paletable. With each passing meal, Google has takes note.
The winning meal (or meals) now have a bit of authority for the next customer who comes in to order "search engine optimization in Niagara". The busy Google restaurant does this millions of times per day with millions of different meals.
During the course of the restaurants operations, various chefs come and go. Sometimes the new chefs prove themselves and take work away from previously good chefs. Other chefs quickly drop out and others fade away into the back alley behind the restaurant. The important takeaway though is that Google will continously go through this process (testing their chefs and seeing whos meal is the latest and greatest) and will present the best meals to their customer. If they do not do this and the customer has a bad experience then the next time they are hungry they may go to the Yahoo restaurant or the Bing restaurant. The Google restaurant does not want to see this happen.
If this whole little anicdote went over your head then here is the final food for thought. As the chef, you don't impress the restaurant owner (Google) by giving them what they want. You impress the restaurant owner by giving them what their customer wants.














