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Google Search

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File:Google-mainpage.png
Google's main page

Google is the most popular search engine on the web. Through its website and the websites of clients like AOL, Google receives roughly 200 million search requests per day. The popularity of Google is evinced by the fact that the verb "to google" is sometimes used generically to mean "to search the web". Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

In addition to web pages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups and news sites. It currently indexes 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images and 845 million Usenet messages, a total of 6 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes.

The company

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A Google search results page.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Ph.D. students who developed the theory that a search engine based on a mathematical analysis of the relationships between websites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them on other sites must be the most relevant ones, they decided to test this thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They founded their company, Google Technologies Inc., on September 7, 1998.

Google gained a following among internet enthusiasts for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. Advertisements were sold by the keyword so that they would be more relevant to the end user, and they were text-based in order to keep page design uncluttered and fast-loading. While many of its dot-com siblings went under, Google quietly rose in stature while turning a profit. The company is privately held, so exact revenue numbers are not available.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading weblog-hosting website. The acquisition seemed inconsistent with the general "mission" of Google. However, it was soon theorized that Google perhaps plans to utilize information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in Google News.

Google's major investors are the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering, the company was approached by Microsoft about a possible partnership or merger; Google apparently rejected the offer. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange its initial public offering. That IPO—one of the most anticipated in history (Marshall, 2003)—might raise as much as $4 billion, giving Google a market capitalization of $12 billion, according to a banker involved in the transaction.

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80% of all search requests on the world wide web through its website and clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN. [1] Google's share dropped in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results.

Etymology

The word "Google" is a play on the word 'googol', which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

Google and the courts

A number of organizations (most controversially the Church of Scientology) have used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that Google remove references to allegedly copyrighted material on other sites. Google typically handles this by removing the link as requested and including a link to the complaint in the search results. There have also been complaints that the "Google cache" feature violates copyright. However, the consensus seems to be that caching is a normal part of the functionality of the web, and that HTTP provides adequate mechanisms for requesting that caching be disabled (which Google respects; it also honors the robots.txt file).

In 2002, news reports surfaced that the Google search engine had been banned in China. A mirror site (in all respects, including mirrored text) called elgooG proved useful to get around the ban. The ban was later lifted, and reports indicated that it was not Google itself that was targeted. Rather, Google's feature of a cached version of a website would allow Chinese users to circumvent any ban of a website itself, merely by visiting the cache instead. There is also a dynamic Google mirror working as a proxy server at http://www.zensur.freerk.com/google/ .

Google's efforts to refine its database has led to some legal controversy, drawing a lawsuit in October 2002 from a company, SearchKing, that sought to sell advertisements on pages with inflated Google rankings. Google stated in its defense that its rankings are its constitutionally protected opinions of the web sites that it lists. A judge threw out SearchKing's lawsuit in mid-2003 on precisely these grounds. [2] [3]

In late 2003 and early 2004, there were persistent rumors that Google would be sued by the SCO Group over its use of the Linux operating system, in conjunction with SCO's lawsuit against IBM over the ownership of intellectual property rights relating to Linux.

The search engine

PageRank and indexing

Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists.

Google employs server farms of more than 100,000 GNU/Linux computers around the world to answer search requests and to index the web. The indexing is performed by a program ("Googlebot") which periodically requests new copies of the web pages it already knows about. The more often a page updates, the more often Googlebot will visit. The links in these pages are examined to discover new pages to be added to its database. The index database and web page cache is several terabytes in size.

Google not only indexes and caches HTML-files but also 12 other file types, including .pdf (Portable Document Format), .txt (text), .doc (Word document), and .xls (Excel spreadsheet). Except in the case of text files, the cached version is a conversion to HTML. Hence Google allows reading these files even without having the corresponding program such as Word or Excel.

The search engine is somewhat customizable, allowing users to set a default language, whether to use "SafeSearch" filtering technology, and setting the number of results displayed per page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, which also enables them to track a user's search terms over time. However, a majority of Google's services can be used with cookies disabled.

For any query (of which only the 10 first keywords are taken into account), up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.

Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data in databases which are accessible from websites by means of queries, but not by links. This so-called deep web is not covered by Google and contains e.g. catalogues of libraries, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, etc.

(For an April Fool's parody of pagerank, see Google's PigeonRank™ page)

"Google dance" and optimization

Since Google has become one of the most popular search engines, many webmasters have become interested in following and attempting to explain changes to the rankings of their websites. An industry of consultants has arisen to assist websites in improving their rankings at Google, as well as other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for increasing rankings.

Forums can be found on the web where phenomena such as the "Google dance" are discussed. The Google dance is a period of a few days towards the end of a month when Google updates its database and ranking algorithms. Changes to the database can be observed by examining the number of results to a search such as "link:www.yahoo.com".

During the "dance" period, a site's ranking may change dramatically over a short period of time and different Google servers (e.g., www.google.com, www2.google.com, www3.google.com, www.google.co.uk, www.google.com.au etc.) may give different results for the same search. The dance period appears to coincide with the time at which the googlebot examines "stable" sites. Rapidly changing sites, highly ranked sites and news sites are examined more often, although apart from news, only minor adjustments are made to rankings during most of the month. In some cases it may take two or three months before new pages appear in search results. The monthly searching, indexing and ranking cycle was replaced by a continuous rolling update in the summer of 2003. This change in the way google updates significantly reduced the unstable results of the monthly update "dance".

One of Google's chief challenges is that as its algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, the profit to be gained by a commercial web site in subverting those results has increased dramatically. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific Google rankings by various artificial means, attempting to draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Google has managed to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.

Google publishes a set of guidelines for website owners interested in improving their rankings using legitimate optimization consultants.

Other Google services

Google Groups (Usenet), machine translation, Google Images

Google maintains a usenet archive, called Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as DejaNews), an experimental machine translation services (see link below), and an image search function (called "Google Images"). The latter is based on the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption, etc. A small version of the images is cached to comply with fair use laws.

Google News

Google introduced a beta release (a product of the so-called Google Labs) of an automated news compilation service, "Google News" in April 2002. There are different versions of the aggregator for the languages English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. To quell any charges of reporting bias, it is fully automated with no human editors.

The service covers the news articles that appeared within the past 30 days on news websites in the language concerned, from various countries; for the English language it covers about 4,500 sites, for the other languages less. It provides around the first 200 characters and links to the full article. Some of these websites require a subscription; in that case this is noted in the Google News summary of their articles.

Google News provides searching, and the choice of sorting the results by date and time of publishing (not to be confused with date and time of the news happening) or grouping them (and also grouping without searching). In the English version the grouping can optionally be tailored to a selected national audience.

Users can request Google News Alerts on various topics by subscribing with the use of key words. An email is sent when a news article matching the request appears online.

Google Answers

In April 2002, Google launched a new service called "Google Answers". Google Answers is an extension to the conventional search - rather than doing the search yourself, you pay someone else to do the search. Customers ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them. Prices for questions range from $2 to $200, Google keeps 25% of the payment, passing the rest to the researchers, and charges an additional 50c listing fee. In May 2003 this service came out of beta, although as of March 2004 the service is still not featured on Google's home page, and has not attracted as many customers as hoped.

Froogle

In December 2003, Google announced Froogle, a spin-off that searches catalogues for particular products. This site had been active in beta for some months. It is now offered in Wireless Markup Language (WML) form and can be accessed from phones or other wireless devices that have support for WML.

Calculator

Google also includes a calculator and units converter. (see below)

Google Definitions

In May, 2002, Google launched as a part of Google Labs, the beta version of Google Glossary, a search tool that, for a given word, retrieves the definitions it has been given on various web pages. After the beta test, Google now merged Google Glossary with Google search engine; the current version called Google Definitions.

Search by Location in the US

In September, 2003, Google launched the beta version of Search by Location, which acts like a normal Google search, but lets you geographically restrict the search (within the U.S.) by state, city or zipcode. It will also provide you with maps to the listed sites, and an estimate on the distance and direction to the sites.

Google Personalized

In March, 2004, Google launched as a part of Google Labs, the beta version of Personalized Web Search, a search tool that, for a given word, retrieves the based upon the profile/interests you specify.

Google Web Alerts

In March, 2004, Google launched as a part of Google Labs, the beta version of Google Web Alerts, a tool that will sent alert by email when there is new information on the web matching the search you specify.

Google Web API

The Google Web API (or Google Web Services) is Google's public interface for registered developers. Using SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol), a programmer can write search or data mining services relying on Google results. Also, cached pages can be viewed, and spelling suggestion be made.

By default a developer has a limit of 1,000 requests per day. This program is still in Beta phase but works very stable. Google is one of the rare search engines which make their results available via a public API; Technorati is another good example.

A good PHP SOAP client to access the Google Web API is NuSOAP. Other samples can be found in DOT.NET, Python, or Java. The developer's download at the Google Web API homepage also comes with source code.

Gmail

On April 1, 2004, Google announced its own free webmail service, Gmail, which would provide users with one gigabyte of storage for their mailboxes and would generate revenue by inserting advertisements from the AdWords service in e-mail messages. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release was greeted with resounding skepticism in the technology world—especially since, on the same day, it had put out another press release saying it would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a "Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon. But Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."

The service is set to allow up to 1000 MB of storage space, more than 166 times that of others free webmail providers, including Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail.

As of April 13, 2004, the service is being tested internally. It is not known when will the service be available to the public.

There has been a great deal of criticism for the Gmail Privacy Policy. Most seem to concern the following clause: "residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account."

Google's software tools

Google Toolbar

This extension to Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later adds Google searching capabilities as a toolbar in the browser. The functionalities of the latest version includes pop-up ads blocking, automatic filling of forms, and the ability to show the Google PageRank value for the current page being viewed. It has been criticized for being a security risk because it updates itself without user intervention.

Other browsers, like Mozilla Firefox and Safari, have built-in search tools that offer the same functionality. Mozilla Firefox also has its own version of the Google Toolbar, the Googlebar, which is developed independently of and is not supported by Google or the Mozilla Firefox developers, the only thing its missing is the Google PageRank functionality.

Google Deskbar

In December 2003, Google launched the beta version of the Google Deskbar, a search tool which runs from the Windows taskbar, without a browser having to be open. It can return film reviews, stock quotes, dictionary and thesaurus definitions, plus any pre-configured search of a third-party site (e.g. eBay or Amazon).

Criticism of Google

While Google's apparent effectiveness has led droves of people to use it as their primary search tool, Google has managed to become the target of critics. Online journalists disliked that Google News equated press releases with news articles. In February 2003, Google banned the ads of Oceana, a two and a half year old non-profit group, which was protesting over a major cruise line's sewage treatment methods. Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington warned that "As courts become more frequent integrators of electronic records, there is a greater risk of Google ... becoming a serious privacy threat." In April 2004, Google received complaints about the way that a search for "Jew" on it site listed the anti-Semitic website "Jew Watch" at the top of the list, possibly as a result of a Googlebomb.

Books

Google calculators

Other national Googles

Argentina - Australia - Austria - Belgium - Brazil - Canada - Chile - Denmark - Finland - France - Lithuania - Germany - Hong Kong - India - Ireland - Israel - Italy - Japan - Latvia - Malta - Mexico - Netherlands - New Zealand - Peru - Poland - Portugal - Russia - Singapore - Slovakia - South Korea - Spain - Sweden - Switzerland - Taiwan - Thailand - Turkey - United Kingdom

All of these sites produce nearly the same search results, though they may be in a different order. (Sometimes certain domains are censored in localized versions of Google, such as domain "whitepower.com" in Google Germany.) National Google sites allow you to search on a global basis or just for sites from that country. Some countries may have different default language settings.

Sites about Google

News stories about Google

Unofficial Google Tools

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