Google

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Google is the most popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Through its website and client websites, such as AOL, Google receives roughly 200 million search requests per day. Google has its headquarters (called the "Googleplex") in Mountain View, California.

In addition to web pages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news sites, and items for sale online. In April 2004, Google contained 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images and 845 million Usenet messages in its index; a total of 6 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes.

The verb "to google" is sometimes used generically to mean "to search the web".

The company

History

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 from other highly relevant webpages 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 users 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 the ads 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. However, its IPO is expected to be offered by the summer of 2004.

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, the move secured the company's ability to utilize information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in Google News.

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 fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results.

Google's code of conduct is Don't be evil.

Financing and IPO

Google's major investors are the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. In October 2003, while discussing a possible IPO, the company was approached by Microsoft about a possible partnership or merger; no such deal ever materialized.

In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange the IPO. That IPO (one of the most anticipated in history) might raise as much as $4 billion. According to a banker involved in the transaction, the deal would produce for Google a market capitalization of $12 billion. On April 29, 2004, Google filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $2.72 billion in an IPO. The filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003.

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. In its defense, Google said 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.

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

Physical structure

Google employs server farms of 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.

The exact size and whereabouts of the physical machines in the google search engine is unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. In John Hennessy and David Pattersons , the server farm cluster forming the Google "search farm" would in the year 2000 have consisted of about 6000 processors, 12000 common IDE-disks (2 per machine, and one machine per processor), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia.

Each site had an OC 48 (2488 Mbps, see broadband Internet access article) connection to the Internet and an OC 12 (622 Mbps) connections to other Google sites. The connections are routed through a Cisco 12000 network switch and split by two Foundry Networks BigIron 8000 Ethernet switches dividing the traffic onto 4 x 1 Gbps lines connecting up to 64 racks, with 40 machines and an HP Ethernet switch on both back and flip side, so that a rack would fit 80 machines and two HP switches.

Based on the Google IPO S-1 prospective in May 2004, a Tristan Louis estimated the current server farm to:

719 racks
63,262 machines
126,544 CPUs
253,088 Ghz of processing power
126,544 Gb of RAM
4,943 Tb of Hard Drive space

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 not only indexes and caches HTML-files but also 12 other file types, including .PDF, .txt, .doc, and .xls. 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.

Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language, use "SafeSearch" filtering technology, and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms over time.

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 eager to follow and to explain changes to the rankings of their websites. A new industry of consultants has arisen to help websites raise their rankings on Google and on 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 artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Google has managed to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites Google knows to use them.

Google publishes a set of guidelines for a website's owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.

Other Google services

Google Groups (Usenet) & Google Images

Google maintains a usenet archive, called Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as DejaNews) 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, see below) 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, there is an option to tailor the grouping to a selected national audience.

Users can request Google News Alerts on various topics by subscribing while using key words. An email is sent when a news article matching the request comes online.

Google Answers

In April 2002, Google launched a new service called "Google Answers". Google Answers is an extension to the conventional search &mdash 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, sends the rest to the researchers, and charges an additional $0.50 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.

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 displaying advertisements from the AdWords service based on words in users' e-mail messages. Owing to April Fool's Day, however, the company's press release was greeted with much skepticism in the technology world. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, re-assured BBC News by 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 was being tested internally. It is not known when will the service be available to the public.

There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy. Most seem to involve 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 Web API

The Google Web API (or Google Web Services) is Google's public interface for registered developers. Using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a programmer can write services for search and data-mining that rely on Google's results. Also, websurfers can view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.

By default a developer has a limit of 1,000 requests per day. This program is still in Beta phase. Google is one of the few search engines to make its results available via a public API; Technorati is another good example. Some popular implementations of the Google Web API include the alerting service Google Alert, as well as the Google Dance Tool, which monitors when Google is spidering the Internet.

Other tools

Google includes a number of tools built intro its search engine interface:

Google provides experimental machine translation services between several languages.
Google includes a calculator and units converter, see below.
In May 2002, Google launched the beta version of Google Glossary as a part of Google Labs. It is 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 is called Google Definitions.
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 zip code. It will also provide users with maps to the listed sites, and an estimate on the distance and direction. This service has since been renamed Google Local.
In March 2004, Google launched the beta version of Personalized Web Search as a part of Google Labs. It is a search tool that, for a given word, fetches results based upon the profile/interests users specify.
In March 2004, Google launched as a part of Google Labs, the beta version of Google Web Alerts, a tool that will send an alert by email when there is new information on the web matching the search users specify.

Google's software tools

Google Toolbar

This addition to Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later adds Google's searching capabilities in a toolbar in the browser. 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. It expands upon the official google toolbar to the point that the only feature not replicated is the Google PageRank functionality. Google has also been built into Safari for Apple Computer's new OS X operating system.

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, DC warned that "As courts become more frequent integrators of electronic records, there is a greater risk of Google ... becoming a serious privacy threat."

Claims of censorship

In April 2004, Google received complaints about the way that a search for "Jew" on its site listed the anti-Jewish website Jew Watch at or towards the top of the list. Google insisted this was a result of their content-neutral algorithm responding to the high PageRank of the Jew Watch website. A Google bomb was employed to place Wikipedia's own entry, Jew, at the top. Jew Watch was also highly ranked in other search engines, such as Yahoo! and MSN, but those companies apparently received little or no criticism.

Jew Watch's main page was dropped from Google's results at the end of April because Jew Watch's web hosting service EV1 cancelled its account, and the site was inaccessible for several days. Since Google's webcrawler could not reach the site after repeated attempts, the main page was dropped from Google's index. [1] The site later found another hosting service and was re-indexed by Google during the first week of May. Google explains that "The only sites we omit are those we are legally compelled to remove," in its disclaimer "Offensive Search Results" of April 23, 2004.

Sites advocating race as a virtue or historical revisionism have been banned for years in the French and German Googles, as such speech is illegal in those countries. Other potentially controversial sites such as hardcore pornographic sites have remained unaffected, however, and web-filtering programs have no effect on searches run from Google's Image section.

Books

Google Hacks from O'Reilly & Associates is a book containing tips about using Google effectively.

External links

Examples (the link texts are what is entered as if it were a search string):

Sites about Google

GoogleFight -- instantly compare two search queries
The Unofficial Google Directory - collection of tools and resources
The Unofficial Google Fan Club
Google Blogoscoped
The Google Weblog
Google Dance Tool
Webmaster World - with forums where Google is actively discussed
Google Watch (Why we nominated Google for the 2003 U.S. corporate Big Brother of the Year)
Google IPO Coverage
Google IPO News

Google Parodies

Cthuugle Search Fhtagn! The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine

Professional Researcher's Encyclopaedia

Knowledge is only a click away

Google - enyclopaedia article

Google

Buy Google related products:

Google

The company

History

Financing and IPO

Etymology

Google and the courts

The search engine

Physical structure

PageRank and indexing

"Google dance" and optimization

Other Google services

Google Groups (Usenet) & Google Images

Google News

Google Answers

Froogle

Gmail

Google Web API

Other tools

Google's software tools

Google Toolbar

Google Deskbar

Criticism of Google

Claims of censorship

Books

Related articles

External links

Google.com links

Other national Googles

Google calculator

Sites about Google

Google Parodies