Is Google a search engine based in Mountain View, CA (California, USA)?
Is Google a search engine? Honest answer: Dunno. Google might be a search engine. It could be a fridge, too. Or a yet undiscovered dinosaur, a scary purple man-eater, a prescription drug, or my mom’s worst nightmare.
According to the search engine pre-installed in my browser, “Dogpile” is a search engine, and “Bing”, “Altavista”, even “Wikipedia”. Also a tool called “Google Custom Search” and a popular blog titled “Search Engine Land” are considered search engines, besides obscure Web sites like “Ask”, “DuckDuckGo”, “MetaCrawler” and “Yahoo”. Sorry, I can’t work with these suggestions.
So probably I need to perform a localized search to get an answer:
Is Google a search engine based in Mountain View, CA?
0.19 seconds later my browser’s search facility delivers the desired answer, instantly in near lightning speed. The first result for [Is Google a search engine based in Mountain View, CA] lists an entity outing itself as “Google Mountain View”, the second result is “Googleplex”.
Wait … that doesn’t really answer my question. First, the search result page says “near Mountain View”, but I’ve asked for a search engine “in Mountain View”. Second, it doesn’t tell whether Google, or Googleplex for that matter, is a search engine or a Swiss army knife. Third, a suitable answer would be either “yes” or “no”, but certainly not “maybe something that matches a term or two found in your search query could be relevant, hence I throw enough gibberish –like 65635 bytes of bloated HTML/JS code and a map– your way to keep you quiet for a while”.
I’m depressed.
But I don’t give up that easily. The office next door belongs to a detective agency. The detective in charge is willing to provide a little neighborly help, so I send him over to Mountain View to investigate that dubious “Googleplex”. The guy appears to be smart, so maybe he can reveal whether this location hosts a search engine or not.
Indeed, he’s kinda genius. He managed to interview a GoogleGuy working in building 43, who tells that #1 rankings for [search engine] can’t be guaranteed, but #1 rankings for long tail phrases like [Google is a search engine based in Mountain View, California, USA] can be achived by nearly everyone. My private eye taped the conversation with a hidden camera and submitted it to America’s Funniest Home Videos:
One question remains: Why can’t a guy that knowledgable make it happen that his employer appears as first search result for, well, [search engine], or at least [search engine based in Mountain View, California]?? Go figure …
Sorry Matt, couldn’t resist. 
Mountain View,
CA
94043
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Sebastian | SEO, Google | Related posts
Is Google a search engine based in Mountain View, CA (California, USA)?…
GREAT stuff from Seb! - SNIP - Is Google a search engine? Honest answer: Dunno. Google might be a search engine. It could be a fridge, too. Or a yet undiscovered dinosaur, a scary purple man-eater, a ……
LOL,,really thats a point… i cant stop laughing..even google cant appear first for search engines..
ROFL LOL LMAO HA HA HA HA.
You have an honest answer here
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+google+a+search+engine?
Nice Vlad, but actually WolframAlpha refines the question to
so the jury is still out on “Is Google a search engine?”
Searching for a search engine? Are you sure that didn’t make a CPU somewhere explode?
you are using the wrong query… take google out of it..
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=search+engine+in+mountain+view,+california
Heh. Don’t fuck with my well crafted search query
As I pointed out to Danny recently, it is a better use of whatever juice they have not to rank for search engine.
In fact Google CSE is a much better sarch result… but they need to fix a lot of links to the wrong page to do it, without funny parameters that get blocked by robots.txt.
A lot of links to google.com home page are blocked by them by using parameters.
Though they probably don’t care too much, CSE and enterprise search should be what they concentrate their efforts on, not their home page for any reason whatsoever.
Andy, of course Google CSE & enterprise search are good results, from a marketer’s perspective.
OTOH, from a plain searcher’s perspective, it’s absolutely laughable that the world’s leading search engine ranks dead services like Dogpile and Altavista above anything Google.
That’s IMHO way more obscene than a hand job. Disclosure: I *am* aware that Google states that their systems lack a method or apparatus to manually edit search results or rankings whatsoever.
[…] Is Google a search engine based in Mountain View, CA (California, USA)? - was another good laugh from the week past… I just wonder WTF Seb get’s up to when he writes this stuff? Whatever it is, please send me a case bro. […]
Interesting to see Steve suggest changing the search query to get better results. I recently wrote an article suggesting why we shouldn’t always blame Google for ‘irrelevant’ search results:
Your Role in Search Engine Relevancy
Perhaps we also have a role to play too.
[Alan, fixed your markup to make the link more prominent. S.]
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crap]