Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this measurement for text.
By estimations, Google owns and operates well over a million servers. The electricity to power these servers is likely one of Google’s larger operating expenses. This energy limitation has helped shape modern search engines by putting text analysis at the forefront of search. Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler programmatically to determine relevancy between a text query and a text document than it is between a text query and an image or video file. This is the reason why text results are so much more prominent in search results than videos and images.
As of this writing, the most recent time that Google publicly released the size of its indices was in 2006. At that time it released the numbers show below:
DATA | SIZE IN TERABYTES |
---|---|
Crawl Index | 800 |
Google Analytics | 200 |
Google Base | 2 |
Google Earth | 70 |
Orkut | 9 |
Personalized Search | 4 |
So what does this emphasis on textual content mean for SEOs? To me, it indicates that my time is better spent optimizing text that images or videos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future as computers get more powerful and energy efficient, but for right now text should be every SEO’s primary focus.