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If you aren’t using Google for your searches, start immediately. In case you already are, keep reading—you might find out some interesting (or obscure) things about the #1 search tool on the Web. I was lucky enough to be there early in the evolution of the Web. Not quite there for Mosaic, but long before my Mom asked me to get her to Home and Garden TV¹s Web site (www.hgtv.com). Back in the old days we used to use Yahoo and Altavista, Excite and Lycos to find stuff online. I still use Yahoo, primarily because my DSL account includes free disk space on Yahoo, but also for maps, people searches, and other specialty searches. However, a relatively new company, Google, does 95% of my online searching. Two college friends founded Google, like Yahoo, HP, Apple, and other great companies. They even spent time in a garage, a sign of great companies like HP and Apple (I’m seeing a pattern here). Unlike most privately held Internet companies, they are profitable. They make money by licensing their search technology and, in the opposite direction Web advertising is running, in small, almost unnoticeable ads. Google is great because it returns sites extremely relevant to your search. If you’ve never used Google before, try it now. They’re so confident in the results they even put an “I’m feeling lucky button” on the main page. Google returns better results than any other search engine because of the simple genius of the engine. They developed “PageRank” technology, which bases the responses on a number of things, but most importantly on the number of sites that point to a site. They figured a site would be the best-based depending on how many people linked to it. Since this basic premise, they’ve had to keep evolving it to prevent cheaters and improve results. The speed and power behind Google
comes from 10,000 Linux-based computers that work together and
provide answers in less than 0.2 seconds. Think about the incredible
task of creating a system that searches 3 billion text documents
and returns answers in less than a second. www.Googlewhack.com - Find two words that return one response from Google (squirreling dervishes or panfish interrogation). Google Smackdown ? (www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp) - Compare the number of results between two search terms (Bush vs. Osama is 14.3 million to 1.3 million ? Bush wins). www.Googlism.com - Find out what Google thinks of you. Google has spawned a book “Hacking Google,” published by O’Reilly & Associates (352 pages!), and numerous Web sites on using, programming, and improving your results. The risk of trying to trick Google could get your site banned for life, so be careful if you¹re trying to increase your results. Google is so successful that Yahoo, an early supporter and customer of Google, has announced that they are creating a better search engine than Google. This is a parable about watching your enemies, but watching your business partners more closely. Google releases new and mostly experimental search tools in Google Labs. This is where you can try out experimental searches, such as the Google Viewer, which returns your search results in a series of scrolling Web pages. A product is released from Google Labs when they figure out how to make money from it. Google just bought Pyra Labs, creators of Blogger.com. This is an interesting purchase—a logical extension of Google¹s attempt to create an index of the entire Web. Blogs are the latest source of news and information, and adding the interesting world of Blogs to Google will only make our search attempts more complete. Google has even become my newspaper. Check out news.Google.com. A beta product, it searches 4,500 new services and creates a unique perspective on the news. By keeping track of the frequency of stories, it can post the most relevant news automatically (no human editors). You have to see this to believe it. I have nothing but admiration for this company that has focused on one task and done it better than anyone before them. By the way, in case you were wondering, a googol is the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros (source: Google.com). |
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Occasionally
you reach a point where you mistakenly assume everyone knows
about something, and by making this assumption you deprive the
person you’re dealing with of a really neat thing. In this
case, it’s Google (