Most people know what Google is. Google is a search engine. So far so good. But do most people know exactly what Google does as it performs its searches? Or rather what makes Google do what it does to give you the results that you get?

There is a certain amount of secret sauce to Google’s algorithms. One thing is for sure, though. Google searches are the most accurate compared to Yahoo and MSN because of Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI.

Latent Semantic Indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about by searching for one or more keywords selected by the user.

It adds an important step to the document index process. LSI records keywords that a document contains as well as examines the document collection as a whole.

By placing importance on related words, or words in similar positions, LSI has a net effect of making the value of pages lower so they only match specific terms.

Search engines such as Google try to figure out phrase relationships when they are processing keyword queries, which in turn improve the rankings of pages with related phrases.

This happens even when those pages are not focused on the target theme. Some pages are too focused on one phrase and they tend to rank worse than you would expect them to.

In fact, some are even filtered out for being overly optimized. Pages that are focused on a wider net of related keywords tend to have more stable rankings.

Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices make the search engine look extremely intelligent.

And if half of what I just said was foreign to you, I guess you can just Google it.