A Bit Of History

he first question most people have is, “What the heck is a “Google?” It is a play on the word “googol,” which is the mathematical figure 1 followed by 100 zeros. Depending on the level of your love for math, this is either the greatest or lamest name for a search engine. Regardless, the clever kids at Google have turned it into a cultural standard.

The Beginning


Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in January of 1996, then known as BackRub. The boys were in the early twenties and classic computer geeks. Sergey was born in Moscow, alum of the University of Michigan and visiting Stanford. Larry was assigned to be his guide. During this visit, they obviously hit it off or today nobody would give a hoot about linking strategies.

Although two men and the name “BackRub” may raise some questions, the name actually referred to a method for producing search engine rankings. Specifically, the BackRub search engine was designed to analyze the “back links” to a site. Although BackRub developed a following with those in the know, nothing much happened for a few years.

1998

As with most new businesses, the boys needed some serious cash. The brass at Yahoo was interested, but initially passed. Sun Microsystems, of all companies, provided an answer. Andy Bechtolsheim was one of the founders of Sun and, thus, had the necessary deep pockets. $100,000 later, the new search engine company was on the way to stardom.

A New Name

As legend has it, BackRub became Google for a rather humorous reason. Apparently, Bechtolsheim accidentally made the $100k check out to “Google, Inc.” You can make your own guess as to which one of the boys said, “Hey, I have an idea for a new name.” In September of 1998, Google opened a small office in Menlo Park, California. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Google is based in Mountain View, California. Google prefers email communication, but you can get a live voice by calling (650) 623-4000. If you really want to talk to them, refuse a charge from the company on the credit card you use for Adwords. They will contact you pretty quickly!

The company went public in 2004 [Symbol: GOOG] and has a stock value of around $250 per share. Larry and Sergey are sickeningly wealthy. One can assume that Andy Bechtolsheim is also doing all right.

The Future

In the last year or so, Google has certainly received its fair share of criticism. PageRank is almost useless in relation to ranking in search results. At the time of this writing, PageRank hasn’t worked for three days, which means a change, shuffle, dance or whatever you want to call it is coming.

On the competition front, things are a bit murky. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a patent lawsuit being filed against the company. MSN and Yahoo have started to raise the level of competition and more will be coming. Google’s reliance on AOL as a traffic source is also a bit troubling given the continual loss of market share by the company that nearly brought Time Warner down. Gmail is dogged by patent issues, not to mention questions about violations of the privacy of users. All and all, things are not as rosy compared to a few years ago, but they can hardly be called bad.

Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to predicting if Google will become just another search engine. Personally, I think it will, but not because of any of the above. Instead, the evolution of the Internet suggests there will be a next “big thing.” Who knows, maybe Google will get a Grub [Grub.org] in its Nutch [Nutch.org].

By: Halstatt Pires

Google’s Forecast For A Speedier Internet

Google is currently the top search engine company in the industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their biggest weapon – their clusters of datacenters). Although they’re at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is definitely what they’re continually using to bring the company forward. Google’s engineers are continually working on ways to improve their search engine’s performance and to give additional features that will enhance user experience.So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how Google intends to improve the speed at which information is retrieved and delivered to the user.

We’ll start with what Google is doing now to address the problem of speed, moving on later on the company’s future plans, clues of which can be found in the company’s patent applications.

Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means that the browser will download a web page to the user’s computer even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded quickly from user’s computer memory.

The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the user is using.

The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user, but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user. Search being the second most popular activity done by users on the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of many Internet users.

"Predictive information retrieval" and "anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine" -two patent applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing: anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search results faster and more personalized for the user.

The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends partial queries to the Google servers that are actually predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what you are looking for based both on what other people are looking for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what it knows about the user. This can include the user’s search history or other factors. Google can then display the list of suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will make searching experience speedier for the user, and will smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.

Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that’s why it’s also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and customers. In the same way that we don’t know how we managed to live in a world of dial up connection now that we’re on broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the Internet.
www.theinternetone.net

Generate revenue while building your traffic.

Still, Google stands by its pledge to do no evil, and when it comes to privacy, the company insists it's being misrepresented, saying that the PI report had inaccuracies and mistakes. In a recent discussion with eWEEK, Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong couldn't specify any mistakes per se in the report but had much to say about what she called Google's unfair portrayal in it.

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Google History

GoogleAnswers is a simple google api experiment. The program tries to answer historical questions with years as answers. It does this by scanning the top 10 pages according to google (from the google cache) for years, i.e. sequences of 4 numbers. The numbers that appear most are good candidates for being the answer.

Of course some number occur more than others on the Internet. 1999 appears more often then 1907, so if we find 1907 as often as 1999, then 1907 is probably the answer. To correct these frequencies differences, I let google search for all numbers from 1800 upwards. This file is available separately. After correcting the frequencies, a new list of candidates is established.

The third refinement is to have google count the number of times the answer candidate occurs together with the question (i.e. what has been called the googleshare of the candidate answer for the question). The answer with the most hits is our best guess. You could correct this answer again for the relative frequencies of numbers on the Internet, but I'm not sure about that.
Does it work? Not perfectly, but better than I expected. Events are placed pretty accurately in time. Events in peoples lives less so, probably because people have so many events in their lives. But please experiment with the code and improve!

Please note that you need a google api key to use this code.
http://douweosinga.com/

Benefits of a Google Search

1. Your search covers more than 1 billion URLs.

Google's index, comprised of more than 1 billion URLs, is the first of its kind and represents the most comprehensive collection of the most useful web pages on the Internet. While index size alone is not the key determinant of quality results, it has an obvious effect on the likelihood of a relevant result being returned.
2. You'll see only pages that include the terms you type.

Unlike many other search engines, Google only produces results that match all of your search terms, either in the text of the page or in the text of the links pointing to the page. This spares you the frustration of viewing a multitude of results that have nothing to do with your search terms.
3. The position of your search terms is treated with respect.

Not only do Google's results contain all of your search terms, but Google also analyzes the proximity of those terms within the page. Google prioritizes results according to how closely your individual search terms appear and favors results that have your search terms near each other. Because of this, the result is much more likely to be relevant to your query.
4. You see what you're getting before you click.

Instead of web page summaries that never change, Google shows an excerpt (or "snippet") of the text that matches your query -- with your search terms in boldface -- right in the search results. This sneak preview gives you a good idea if a page is going to be relevant before you visit it.
5. You can feel lucky and save time doing it.

Google excels at producing extremely relevant results, and flat out nails many queries such as company names. We're so confident, in fact, that we've installed an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which takes you directly to the site of the highest ranked result in your search. Try it and let us know if our confidence is justified.
6. You can get it, even when it's gone.

As Google crawls the web, it takes a snapshot of each page and analyzes it to determine the page's relevance. You can access these cached pages if the original page is temporarily unavailable due to Internet congestion or server problems. Though the information on cached pages is frequently not the most recent version of a site, it usually contains useful information. Plus, your search terms will be highlighted in color on the cached page, making it easy to find the section of the page relevant to your query.
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