Why is "Google" not shown as a search result when one googles "Search Engine"?

google don't want to showoff jokes apart. I g...

Our ranking algorithm simply doesn't rank google.com highly for the query "search engine." There is not a single, simple reason why this is the case. If I had to guess, I would say that people who type "search engine" into Google are usually looking for general information about search engines or about alternative search engines, and neither query is well-answered by listing google.com. To be clear, we have never manually altered the search results for this (or any other) specific query. When I tried the query "search engine" on http://bing.com, the results were similar; bing.com was #5 and google.com was #6.

Because people rarely ask directions to where they already are.

Believe it is something similar to this http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551 Government and other bodies are complaining that they aren't allowing fair rankings.

Because I guess Google doesn't want to seem like the master of the obvious. If you are googling "search engine" the odds that you know you are on Google are pretty high and Google assumes you know that. Also, I guess that they re just being humble ;)

In fact Google did never show up for that keyword. There is a simple answer: Google is really bad in onpage optimization. For us http://google.com is the "worst case" website to demonstrate the features of our onpage analyzing software. No other web site has so many errors like http://google.com. And this is a fact for many years. Google also penalized itself for doing SEO several times, but they never did onpage optimization. They would get in #1 position with "search engine" with just some simple changes on their web site. So if they would just put "search engine" in the title of their web site, this would help. But the number of broken links, duplicate content and all other onpage SEO problems is huge. Google always focussed on branding, not on SEO. In their case it worked as they had the best search engine. I started doing SEO before Google was born. They never did SEO, they just focused on creating the best search engine. Googles success mainly based on mouth-to-mouth. Google is a great example that success is possible without doing SEO at all. And even never spending anything in marketing (I am not sure when they began to spend money into marketing). But it is of course an exception. I would say 95% of all business will need SEO for success. And as others already stated, it is not their strategy to get listed for "search engine". They never had that strategy like other search engines to get listed with their own search results in other search engines. They focused on delivering best results.