Essential Information & explanations, latest texts & monographs on Google.


Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools by Tara Calishain

Google Pocket Guide by DJ Adams

How to Use Google : The 30 Most Important Tips, Hacks and Tricks by Titanium Books

e.encyclopedia by Google

Getting The Search Engine Ranking Your Website Deserves: : META Tags Yield To Google's PageRank As Search Engine S by Transformata Publishing LLC

How to Do Everything with Google by Fritz Schneider

Google for Dummies by Brad Hill

Google in 30 Pages or Less by Timesaver Books

Learn Google by Michael Busby

Google: The Missing Manual by Sarah Milstein

Front Line: Larry Page -- Interview With CEO Of Google by BrownHerron Publishing

10 Quick Steps to Making Perfect Google AdSense by audible.com

Building Your Business with Google For Dummies® by Brad Hill

Mining Google Web Services: Building Applications with the Google API by John Paul Mueller

501 Web Site Secrets: Unleash the Power of Google®, Amazon®, eBay® and More by Michael Miller


Google

Google Google's main page Classification Search engine or the company Google Inc. Creators Larry Page, Sergey Brin Since September 7, 1998 [1] No. of web pages searching 4,285,199,774 Company address 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 phone: 650-623-4000 fax: 650-618-1499 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 evidenced by the fact that the verb "to google" is sometimes used generically to mean "to search the web". 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, it 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. Google's code of conduct is Don't be evil. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 The company 1.1 History 1.2 Financing and IPO 1.3 Etymology 1.4 Google and the courts 2 The search engine 2.1 Physical structure 2.2 PageRank and indexing 2.3 "Google dance" and optimization 3 Other Google services 3.1 Google Groups (Usenet) & Google Images 3.2 Google News 3.3 Google Answers 3.4 Froogle 3.5 Gmail 3.6 Google Web API 3.7 Other tools 4 Google's software tools 4.1 Google Toolbar 4.2 Google Deskbar 5 Criticism of Google 5.1 Censorship 6 Books 7 Related articles 8 External links 8.1 Google.com links 8.2 Other national Googles 8.3 Google calculator 8.4 Sites about Google 8.5 Google Parodies 8.6 News stories about Google The company A Google search results page. 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 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. 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. [2] Google's share fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results. 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 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. 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. seen in Google HQ lot 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. [3] [4] 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 L. Hennessy and David Pattersons 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 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 certain 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 (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. 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. However, websurfers can use a majority of Google's services with cookies off. 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 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. 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. Nevertheless, 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 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 SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol), 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 but is 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. 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 and [5].
  • 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 zipcode. It will also provide you with maps to the listed sites, and an estimate on the distance and direction to the sites. 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 is also been built into Apple Computer's browser Safari for its 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 warned that "As courts become more frequent integrators of electronic records, there is a greater risk of Google ... becoming a serious privacy threat." 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 insists 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 has been removed from Google search results, and does not appear at all in searches for Jew. Google insists "The only sites we omit are those we are legally compelled to remove," in its disclaimer "Offensive Search Results" of April 23, 2004. [6] 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 hard core pornographic sites have remained unaffected, however, and web-filtering programs have no effect on searches run from Google's Image section. Books Related articles External links Google.com links Other national Googles Sorted by URL: 1. United Arab Emirates, 2. American Samoa, 3. Österreich, 4. Azərbaycan, 5. België, 6. Burundi, 7. Canada, 8. Rep. Dem. du Congo, 9. Rep. du Congo, 10. Schweiz, 11. Cote D'Ivoire, 12. Chile, 13. Costa Rica, 14. Magyarország, 15. ישראל (Hebrew), 16. India, 17. Jersey, 18. Japan, 19. Korea, 20. Lesotho, 21. New Zealand, 22. Thailand, 23. UK, 24. Venezuela, 25. Antigua and Barbuda, 26. Argentina, 27. Australia, 28. Brasil, 29. Colombia, 30. Cuba, 31. Rep. Dominicana, 32. Ecuador, 33. Fiji, 34. Gibraltar, 35. Greece, 36. Hong Kong, 37. Malta, 38. México, 39. Malaysia, 40. Namibia, 41. Norfolk Island, 42. Nicaragua, 43. Nepal, 44. Panamá, 45. Perú, 46. Pilipinas, 47. Pakistan, 48. Puerto Rico, 49. Paraguay, 50. Singapore, 51. El Salvador, 52. Türkiye, 53. Taiwan, 54. Україна, 55. Uruguay, 56. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 57. Viet Nam, 58. Deutschland, 59. Djibouti, 60. Danmark, 61. España, 62. Suomi, 63. Micronesia, 64. France, 65. Guernsey, 66. Grønlands, 67. The Gambia, 68. Honduras, 69. Ireland, 70. Italia, 71. Kazakhstan, 72. Liechtenstein, 73. Lietuvos, 74. Luxemburg, 75. Latvija, 76. Montserrat, 77. Mauritius, 78. Malawi, 79. Nederland, 80. Anguilla, 81. Polska, 82. Pitcairn Islands, 83. Portugal, 84. România, 85. Russia, 86. Rwanda, 87. Sverige, 88. Saint Helena, 89. Slovenskej republiky, 90. San Marino, 91. Tchad, 92. Trinidad and Tobago, 93. O'zbekiston, 94. British Virgin Islands All of these sites produce nearly the same search results, though they may be in a different order. Domains that are threatening to the global order 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. Google calculator Examples (the link texts are what is entered as if it were a search string): Sites about Google Google Parodies News stories about Google Google the search engine should not be confused with Googol the number.
The above article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Recent related patents from USPTO:
6732088: Collaborative searching by query induction
6728755: Dynamic user profiling for usability
6728752: System and method for information browsing using multi-modal features
6728695: Method and apparatus for making predictions about entities represented in documents
6728142: Distributed write data drivers for burst access memories
6725259: Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity
6722107: Apparatus for forming and containing waste containing packs
6721781: Method of providing an alternative audio format of a web page in response to a request for audible presentation of the same
6715141: Multiphase single pass interpreter
6714934: Method and system for creating vertical search engines
6704727: Method and system for generating a set of search terms
6697821: Content development management system and method
D487124: Ballet balancing bar
6691112: Method for indexing and managing a searchable community of non-HTML information
6691108: Focused search engine and method
6687738: Establishing an internet telephone call using e-mail
6687685: Automated medical decision making utilizing bayesian network knowledge domain modeling
6684218: Standard specific
6681307: Method and system for expanding volume capacity
6678681: Information extraction from a database
6678673: System and method for providing appropriate hyperlink based on identified keywords from text messages sent between users
6674453: Service portal for links separated from Web content
D485001: Solar light
D485000: Solar light
6670968: System and method for displaying and navigating links
D484630: Solar light
6665837: Method for identifying related pages in a hyperlinked database
6662177: Search user interface providing mechanism for manipulation of explicit and implicit criteria
6661432: System and method for dynamically searching an identified web site
6658476: Client-server protocol support list for standard request-response protocols
6658464: User station software that controls transport, storage, and presentation of content from a remote source
6658423: Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files
6658408: Document information management system
D482868: Picnic basket
D482478: Solar powered outdoor light
D482477: Luminaire
6647383: System and method for providing interactive dialogue and iterative search functions to find information
6642552: Inductive storage capacitor
6636848: Information search using knowledge agents
6634060: Coordinated multi-axis hinge and closure using the same
6631367: Method and apparatus to search for information
6627164: Sodium zirconium carbonate and zirconium basic carbonate and methods of making the same
D479432: Wok
D479385: Design for a T-shirt
6615209: Detecting query-specific duplicate documents
D479355: Lighting device
6611862: User station software that controls transport and presentation of content from a remote source
6610277: Appetite suppressant toothpaste
6607440: Method and apparatus for identifying a winner in a bingo game


Bibliographic Resources
Updates and comments at Essential Facts blog
Are you interested in Feng Shui?
Price Theory Resources
World Class Photographers
Some philosophical movements
Top PDF and eBook Downloads

Interesting Links

Sports
Kitchen Knowledge
Hollywood Icons
Mythology
Philosophy
Politics
Retirement

Accounting & Finance
Automobiles
Marketing
Psychology
Academic Subjects
Ancient Greeks
Art & Design
Biology
Biology & Biologists
California
Cats & Dogs
Ethics
Logic
The Greats
Architectural Dates & Places
* Mathematics & Mathematicians
Medical Update d06 More
Chromosomes and Genomics
Enginering Systems 1
Investments
Transportation
Mathematics
Brilliant Mathematicians
Classic Authors
Fear No Exams
Nexus
Characters & countries
Computers + 2
Science Plus
Science & Computers
Quantum Theory
Home, Site-Map


Note again ... some material here is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

©2004, All applicable rights reserved as appropriate.