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Google began as a research project in early [[1996]] by [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]], two [[Stanford University|Stanford]], [[Doctor of Philosophy|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. It was originally nicknamed '''BackRub''' because the system checked [[backlinks]] to estimate a site's importance.
Google began as a research project in early [[1996]] by [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]], two [[Stanford University|Stanford]], [[Doctor of Philosophy|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. It was originally nicknamed '''BackRub''' because the system checked [[backlinks]] to estimate a site's importance.


Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant webpages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They formally founded their company, '''Google Inc.''', on [[September 7]], [[1998]] at a friend's garage in [[Menlo Park, California|Menlo Park]], California. google.com went live soon thereafter under the name "Google!" (with an [[exclamation mark]]). In February [[1999]], the company moved into the somewhat notorious [[165 University Ave|165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California]] office location, before moving to the "[[Googleplex]]" later that year.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant webpages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They formally founded their company, '''Google Inc.''', on [[September 7]], [[1998]] at a friend's garage in [[Menlo Park, California|Menlo Park]], California. google.com went live soon thereafter under the name "Google!" (with an [[exclamation mark]]). In February [[1999]], the company moved into the somewhat notorious [[165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California]] office location, before moving to the "[[Googleplex]]" later that year.


Google gained a following among [[Internet]] users for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. The simple design was due to Brin's lack of interest in writing [[HTML]], wanting only a quick interface. [[Advertisement]]s 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.
Google gained a following among [[Internet]] users for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. The simple design was due to Brin's lack of interest in writing [[HTML]], wanting only a quick interface. [[Advertisement]]s 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.

Revision as of 02:56, 4 February 2005

For other uses, see Google Search (disambiguation).
File:Google screenshot.png
Google's main page's unusually spartan design, uncluttered appearance and quick loading time have contributed greatly to the site's mass appeal.

Google is a U.S.–based search engine owned by Google Inc. whose mission "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The largest search engine on the web, Google receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services.

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos and items for sale online. As of November 2004, Google has indexed 8.05 billion webpages, 880 million images, and 845 million Usenet messages — in total, over 9.5 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Some of the other programs that operate under Google control include Blogger, Picasa, Keyhole, Froogle, and Google Desktop Search.

"To google," as a verb, has come to mean "to search for something on Google"; because of Google's popularity (currently 52 percent of all web searches [1], but was as high as 80 percent) it has also generically come to mean "to search the web." Google officials have discouraged this usage of the company name, as it could lead to their name becoming a genericized trademark.

As several large companies have been wont to do on the internet, as a corporation Google purchased the redirecting rights to several similar-sounding URLs (ex. gogle.com, googel.com etc). Some humourous ones, such as www.cheesemuffin.info, are also "secretly" used by them. Other domains may be found in the "external links" section.

History

Google began as a research project in early 1996 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. It was originally nicknamed BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant webpages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They formally founded their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. google.com went live soon thereafter under the name "Google!" (with an exclamation mark). In February 1999, the company moved into the somewhat notorious 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California office location, before moving to the "Googleplex" later that year.

Google gained a following among Internet users for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. The simple design was due to Brin's lack of interest in writing HTML, wanting only a quick interface. 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.

In September 2001, Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was awarded a U.S. Patent. The patent was officially awarded to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. [2]

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80 percent of all search requests on the world wide web through its website and clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN.[3] Google's share fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results.

Google includes humorous features such as cartoon Modifications[4] (called "Google Doodles") of their logo for special occasions, the option to display the site in fictional or humorous languages such as Klingon and Leet, and April Fool's Day jokes about the company.

It is conjectured that Google's future is personalized searches, using the data that is gathered from Orkut, Gmail, and Froogle to give results based on an individual's previous actions. In fact, there is a Personalized Google Search Beta in Google Labs, the experimental section of the site.

Etymology

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

Controversy

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 which is a mechanism to allow the owners of a site to request that part or all of their site not be included in search engine listings).

In 2002, news reports surfaced that the Google search engine had been banned in mainland 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.

See also the Criticisms of Google section below.

The search engine

Physical structure

Google employs server farms of Linux computers around the world to answer search requests and to index the web. The server farms are built using a shared nothing architecture. 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 has developed their own filesystem, Google File System, for storing all this information.

The exact size and whereabouts of the physical machines in the Google search engine are unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 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 processor per machine), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia.

Each site had an OC 48 (2488 Mbit/s, see broadband Internet access article) connection to the Internet and an OC 12 (622 Mbit/s) 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 Gbit/s 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 form released in April 2004, Tristan Louis, the Vice President of application development for the Internet unit of a large financial firm, estimated the current server farm to contain something like the following [5]:

  • 719 racks
  • 63,272 machines
  • 126,544 CPUs
  • 253,088 GHz of processing power
  • 126,544 GB of RAM
  • 5,062 TB of hard drive space

According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, at 126-316 teraflops, being able to perform at least three times as many calculations per second as the Earth Simulator.

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 13 other file types [6], which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and plain text files. Except in the case of text files, the cached version is a conversion to HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.

Google may have difficulty indexing some websites, in particular those that use frames, links embedded within JavaScript or Java, or complex URLs with more than six variables in the query string. Google offers an explanation why some web pages haven't been included.

Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language, use "SafeSearch" filtering technology (which is 'ON' by default), 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 32 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 optimization

Since Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters have become eager to influence their websites' Google rankings. An 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 improving rankings.

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 known to use them.

Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and "off page" factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page," in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms.

One "off page" technique that works particularly well is Google bombing in which websites link to another site using a particular phrase in the anchor text, in order to give the site a high ranking when the word is searched for.

Google publishes a set of guidelines for a website's owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants. A more comprehensive guide to SEO ethics standards is available from the New Zealand DMA.

Google services

Google Answers

File:Google.Answers.png

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 themselves, users pay someone else to do the search. Customers ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them. Researchers are screened through an application process that tests their research and communications abilities. 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. Once a question is answered, it remains available for anyone to browse for free. This service came out of beta in May 2003 and presently receives more than one hundred question postings per day.

Google Catalogs

File:Google.Catalogs.png

As of late August, 2004, Google's catalogs search feature is in the beta stage. Numerous (over 6,600 at the time of this writing) print catalogs are archived on Google as scanned image files. Through the use of character recognition, users can search for a text string in these catalogs in a fashion similar to how they would for materials on the general web. Matching results are displayed through thumbnails of the page(s) on which the text was found, with the specific area of the page where the search result is found shaded in a yellow box. Another image file next to the thumbnail, a shrunk version of the highlighted area on the thumbnail, highlights the exact location of the search result. Users can then access the page of the catalog (as a larger graphic file) and change pages by using a navigation bar positioned above the page image. It might be worth noting that one can access the catalogs without a search as well.

Google Directory

File:Google.Directory.png

The directory is a subset of the links in Google's database arranged into hierarchical subcategories like an advanced Yellow Pages of the web. The original source of the directory, and the categorization is the Open Directory Project (ODP), which has its own website at http://dmoz.org/

The ODP publishes a easily parsed version of its database in Resource Description Framework format for other sites, like Google, to use for derivative directories.

Froogle

File:Froogle.png

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.

Google Groups

File:Google.Groups.png

Google maintains a usenet archive, called Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as Deja News).

Google is currently testing a new version of its Groups service, which archives mailing lists in addition to usenet posts, using the same interface as Gmail (see below).

Google Images

File:Google.Images.png

In 2003, Google announced Google Images, which allows users to search the web for image content. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When searching for an image, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed.

Google Labs

File:Google.Labs.png

Google Labs consists of all of Google's experimental technologies. Located at http://labs.google.com/, Google Labs is akin to a directory page that links to all Google technologies under development or in beta that have not yet been made widely available. From the Google Labs home page, a user can access Google Suggest, Google Desktop Search, and other web technologies.

Google News

File:Google.News.png

Google introduced a beta release of an automated news compilation service, "Google News" in April 2002. There are different versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages, with more added all the time. 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 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 Print

File:Google.Print.png

In August 2004, Google announced its new "Google Print" service. This tool searches the contents of books submitted by publishers and displays matches above web matches on the search result page. It offers links to purchase the book, as well as content-related advertisements. Google will limit the number of viewable pages from any book through user-tracking. As of early January 2005, this service remains in the beta stage. This feature is similar to a service offered by A9.com.

In December 2004, Google announced an extension to its Google Print program [7]. It is a non-exclusive deal with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the University of Michigan, Harvard (Widener Library), Stanford (Green Library), Oxford (Bodleian Library), and the New York Public Library. According to press releases and university librarians, Google plans to have approximately 15 million public domain volumes online within a decade. [8][9][10][11]

Google Scholar

File:Google.Scholar.png

In November, 2004, Google released "Google Scholar", which indexes and searches academic literature across an array of sources and disciplines. Results are ranked by "relevance", which is based largely on the number of citations and in this sense is similar to PageRank.

Google Special

Allows users to perform special searches such as U.S. Government Search, Linux Search, BSD Search, Apple Macintosh Search, and a Microsoft Windows Search.

Google Suggest

File:Google Suggest (Beta) blacklist demo animation 1.gif

A new feature called Google Suggest Beta was introduced on December 10, 2004. It provides an autocomplete functionality that gives the user suggestions as they type. JavaScript is used to rapidly query the server and update the page for each keystroke that the user types. The feature quickly drew widespread praise as an impressive innovation, and so far competitors have not offered anything similarly real-time.

It was also quickly noticed that Google attempts to avoid suggesting potentially offensive searches. For instance, there are no suggestions for searches containing the word porn, but there are many for pr0n and other variations that aren't on the blacklist. Although pr0n (with a zero) is allowed, pron is on the blacklist, which has the side-effect of not suggesting searches containing any words that include pron such as apron, mispronunciation, pronunciation or prone. Unlike pron and sex, the word ass is only blacklisted when it appears with a space after it, so words containing ass such as associated are suggested. The blacklist also includes the word lesbian, but not faggot, nigger, shit, or several other words that are often included on profanity blacklists.

Google University

Allows users to search within certain University domains.

Google Video

On January 25 2005, Google introduced a beta of Google Video, allowing users to search through television content based on title, network or a closed caption transcript. [12]

Certain show links redirect to Wikipedia articles for details. Other program summaries clearly show that Google Video is in a developmental stage, outputting such excerpts as $Ithlst klb$di I$Dir$| where script lines should be.

Google Wireless

Allows users to search using Google from wireless devices such as mobile phone and PDAs.

Other tools

  • Google offers a pay-per-click ad service called AdWords that allows advertisers to display their ads alongside Google search results and on web sites that participate in the AdSense program.
  • Google provides experimental machine translation services between several languages.
  • Google includes a calculator and units converter. The calculator includes an Easter egg, the "answer to life the universe and everything" ([13]), a reference to Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
  • 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 users 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 Labs launched two more beta features. One, a version of Personalized Web Search, is a search tool that fetches search results based upon the profile/interests users specify. The other is 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 Tools

Google Browser Buttons

This tool allows users to put links to Google services in their web browsers.

Google Deskbar

In December 2003, Google launched the beta version of the Google Deskbar, a search tool which runs from the Microsoft 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).

Google Deskbar API

In November 2004, Google launched an API for Google Deskbar.

File:Google.Desktop.Logo.png

Known internally under the codename Puffin, Google Desktop Search runs locally on a PC and will index all Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express emails, text documents, Microsoft Office documents, AOL Instant Messenger conversations, and the Internet Explorer history on that PC, and allow the user to search them from a browser. Google Desktop Search is an extension of Google Search. After indexing a user's files, his or her local results will turn up on normal Google search on his or her local computer.

Google Desktop Search does not store users' files on the web and users' personal information is not sent to Google.

Google Desktop Search was likely developed in response to file and Web search capabilities that will be offered in the next major release of Microsoft Windows, codenamed Longhorn (slated for release in 2006) — features that directly compete with Google's core Internet search business.

Currently, Google Desktop Search does not support Google's "Did You Mean" feature. For example, if a user lets it look up his or her computers for "chicke", it will not ask whether he or she meant 'chicken'.

Desktop Search received much attention because it may allow reverse engineering of Google's proprietary search algorithm.

Google Language Tool

This tool allows users to use Google in many different languages.

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.

A separately downloadable add-on for the toolbar allows participation in Google Compute, a distributed computing project to help scientific research.

Other browsers, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, 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. There are other tools that bring the pagerank functionality to Mozilla and Firefox, including a modification of Googlebar. Googlebar has also been built into Safari for Apple Computer's new Mac OS X operating system.

Google Translate Tool

This tool allows users to translate pages and text into other languages.

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, or FindForward, as well as the Google Dance Tool, which monitors when Google is spidering the Internet.

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 as well. Online journalists disliked that Google News equated press releases with news articles.

Claims of partiality

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. Google claimed that their editorial policy "states that Google does not accept advertising if the ad or site advocates against other individuals, groups, or organizations."

Offensive search results

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[14]. A Google bomb was employed to place the online encyclopedia Wikipedia's 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. [15] 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.

Claims of censorship

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. The Chinese version of Google restricts searches on tens of thousands of keywords, acting as a technological partner to the content control policies of the Chinese central government [16]. Other potentially controversial sites such as hardcore pornographic sites have remained almost unaffected, however (only suppressed by a default "moderate SafeSearch" filter).

In late 2004 some participants on Internet forums noted that Google was not returning results for image searches dealing with the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal featuring now infamous soldier Lynndie England, at a time when search engines such as Yahoo!, Lycos, and AltaVista returned plenty of images on the subject [17]. Google claimed [18] that the reason for the missing search results was the slow update cycle of Google's image search rather than censorship. As of January 2005, a search for "Lynndie England" returned more than 1000 images at Google Images, compared to about 325 at Yahoo Image Search.

Claims of privacy invasion

Main article: Google and Privacy

It has been claimed that Google infringes the privacy of visitors by uniquely identifying them using cookies. It is claimed the cookies possess excessively distant expiry dates and that users' searches are recorded without permission for advertising purposes. In their defense Google claim cookies are necessary to maintain user preferences between sessions and the website otherwise functions normally if the user turns down the cookies.

Some users believe the processing of email message content by Google's GMail service goes beyond proper use. The point is often made that people without GMail accounts, who have not agreed to the GMail terms of service, but send email to GMail users have their correspondence analyzed without permission. Google claims that mail sent to or from GMail is never read by a human being, and is only used to improve relevance of advertisements. Other popular email services such as Hotmail also scan incoming email to try to determine whether it is unsolicited email.

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."

Criticisms of PageRank system

Google's central PageRank system has been criticized, some calling it 'undemocratic'. Common arguments by Google's detractors are that the system is unfairly biased towards large sites, and that the criteria for a page's importance are not subject to peer review.

National Security Agency

Some have pointed out the privacy implications of having a centrally located, widely popular data warehouse of millions of internet users' searches, and how under existing US law Google would be required to hand over all such information to the US government. Google has also hired at least one former NSA employee where a security clearance was still required for the job. See google-watch.org for more information.

Index size

  • ~ 1998: ~ 25,000,000
  • August 2000: 1,060,000,000
  • January 2002: 2,073,000,000
  • February 2003: 3,083,000,000
  • September 2004: 4,285,000,000
  • November 2004: 8,058,044,651 web pages, 880,000,000 images, 845,000,000 messages, 4,500 news sources

(source: Internet Archive copy of google.com)

Google jargon

  • SEO = Search Engine Optimization
  • to google = to search something using google (also, to seek information on someone by entering their full name or other information)
  • Googler = is a person who makes it easy to search the Google. Uses the google commands very efficiently. Uses the most of times "I am feeling lucky" button while searching. Fan of a google. 'Googler' is sometimes also used for "Expert Online Searcher".
  • Noogler = New Googler
  • Googlosophy = The science of Google
  • Googlenym, Googlonym, Memomark, Google URL = A mental bookmark expressed as Google search ("go to my site by entering 'John Doe Chicago' into Google")
  • SERPs = Search Engine Result Pages
  • Nigritude ultramarine, SERPs, Seraphim Proudleduck, Mangeur de cigogne = SEO competitions
  • Blackhat SEO = search engine optimization using dirty tricks such as linkfarms, wiki or guestbook spamming, and so on
  • Googledork = A person who accidentally exposes information to the web by placing it into a location spidered by Google.
  • Whitehat SEO = search engine optimization using enhanced content, improved accessibility and usability, unique page titles, non-JavaScript linking methods, and so on
  • google-proof = search-phrase delivering exactly the intended result while searching with google
  • Sandbox Effect = The name given to the phenomenon in which Google filters (from its results) websites created after March 2004.

Books

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