Google was established in 1998 and has become one of the most popular search engines in existence to date. It was developed as a research project by two students at Stanford University named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google’s popularity has grown in rapid speed since its release. Now it is owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Google now receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services.

One of the reasons for its success is due to its simplicity and to the number of results it delivers in the order of link popularity and PageRank. The PageRank is how Google considers how many web sites and web pages link to a given page, on the premise that good and desirable pages are linked more than others. The PageRank of the linking pages and the number of links on these pages contribute to the PageRank of the linked page. So, Google can order its results by how many web sites link to each found page.

Google (and most other web engines) utilises not only PageRank but more than 150 criteria to determine relevancy. The algorithm "remembers" where it has been and indexes the number of cross-links and relates these into groupings. This search engine, not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, among others.

Since Google is the most popular search engine, it has become very important for everyone who wants a website to be seen, to influence the website's google ranking. The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a method which aims to increase the number and position of Google's (and other search engines') organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimisation can often be very effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site. Most people, unsurprisingly, find all this bewildering, but Clever Penguin is here to help.