Google Explains How It Processes Queries & Ranks Content

The goal of Google's ranking process is to provide search results with webpages that are high quality, trustworthy, and relevant to the user. Relevance to the user involves personalization, which can include factors such as previous searches, topicality, and geolocation.

Google processes and interprets search queries by first cleaning up the search query. This involves removing stop words (like 'and', 'in', 'is', 'on', 'the'), identifying entities that need stop words, and performing query expansion. Query expansion combines search queries with other similar queries to ensure that a webpage can rank for related searches even if the exact phrase doesn't appear on the webpage.

Google considers a variety of factors when ranking webpages, including:

• Relevancy to the user: This is determined by hundreds of factors, with the actual content of the page being the most important.
• User location, language, and device type: These factors can influence the relevance of search results.
• Quality of the webpage and the site: This includes the uniqueness of content and the relative importance of the page on the Internet.
• Surfaced search features: These are query-dependent and can change based on the user's query.

The uniqueness of content is emphasized in Google's ranking considerations because it is an important quality factor. Unique content is interpreted not just as non-duplicated content, but also as content that is distinct and unlike other things altogether. This uniqueness is crucial because it differentiates a webpage from others and can prevent it from being categorized as 'discovered not indexed' in search console.

Search features on Google's Search result pages are query-dependent, meaning that different queries will trigger different search features. These features change based on the user's query to provide the most relevant and useful information for that specific search.