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As it turns out, the reason Google Inc. is so dominant in the Internet search game and why competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are having a tough time catching up has a lot to do with Paris Hilton.

Not all search engines were created equal, but today their technology and the websites they dig up are largely the same, analysts say. What separates Google from the rest of the pack is a history of being the first to develop new strategies to improve and monetize its search practices and a willingness to continue to tinker with its winning formula.

While Microsoft and Yahoo were busy building out their portal offerings - adding everything from celebrity gossip links to stock tips to their Web home pages - Google concentrated on building a better search engine.

By remaining focused solely on search, Google was able to create a sophisticated technology which favoured popular sites that users deemed useful. In effect, as more people used Google, the better its search technology became.

Which led to a self-perpetuating process: Google was able to remain the best search engine simply because it was the best. It wasn't long before Google became synonymous with the practice of digging up information online. "Paris Hilton is famous because everyone thinks she is famous," said Tim Richardson, an e-commerce professor at Seneca College in Toronto. "Google is popular because everybody says Google is popular."

Google's lead in searches is large enough that even if Microsoft's planned $44-billion (U.S.) acquisition of Yahoo is approved and the two companies combine their individual shares of the search pool, the resulting amalgamation would still have barely half the market share of Google.

Google receives about 56 per cent of all the Web search queries in the U.S. compared with about 22 per cent for Yahoo and 10 per cent for Microsoft, according to media tracker comScore. However, Google's share of overall revenues generated from search-based advertising is closer to 75 per cent because marketers prefer to place their ads on the most-used search engine.

Google uses a complex series of mathematical algorithms to determine what information someone is looking for when they punch in their query. It originally differentiated its service by using a process called PageRank, which favours websites deemed popular and useful by users, rather than ones that met a certain set of data criteria.

By applying those same principles to the way it places its advertisements, Google was able to build its search-based advertising business in leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft and Yahoo. By the time its competitors eventually developed their own versions of this technology, Google had a vast head start. "What Google did was rank where adverts appeared relative to the search results, in terms of how much people were prepared to pay, multiplied by how frequently they were clicked," said Jeffrey Lindsay, senior analyst for the Internet at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. "That was the major innovation that made Google; it wasn't on the search engine front end, it was on the back end."

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How sites are ranked

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo closely guard the secrets of their search engine algorithms; however, there are some elements that are widely known to play a role in determining a site's ranking in any keyword search.

Identification and labels: Search engines take into account the title of the page (words displayed in the top border of a browser window) as well as the site's Universal Resource Locator or URL (the line that begins http://www.) to determine the entry that pops up during the query.

Spiders: Websites like Google use programs called "Spiders" - also known as "Bots" or "Crawlers" - which go through a website's pages and tags, scanning and indexing the information. Tags: All sites have bits of code called "tags" that are invisible to users but tell search engine spiders what a website is about (for example, dogs) and what content appears on each page (poodles).

Content: The frequency with which relevant words are used on a page and the context in which they are used also plays a role in determining the search ranking of a given site. Traffic: Just how popular a page is plays a role in how relevant it is deemed by a search engine. Websites with lots of visitors tend to rank higher, as do sites with links both to and from other pages on the Internet.

Source: Prof. Tim Richardson