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With servers made of parts bought, begged, and borrowed, Brin and Page were soon running a popular search engine from Page’s dorm room. Math geeks, they called the search engine Google, after the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeroes (a googol). It’s a truly colossal number, and it implies that the tally of Web pages around the world is unimaginably huge, too. At first, Brin and Page wanted to license their technology to existing sites, not build a company. Unfortunately, interest was low at the companies they pitched to, and the partners needed more and more server space to stay ahead of the volume of Web pages Google was indexing. After angel investors and venture capitalists started handing them checks—the first one uncashable until there was a “Google, Inc.” to receive it—Brin and Page had to form a company, and fast. Google officially incorporated on Sept. 7, 1998. Its first office was in a friend’s spare room in Menlo Park, Calif. To try and preserve their pregnant friend’s privacy, Brin, Page, and their few employees entered and exited through the garage. Besides the results, users liked Google’s speed and simple look. The Database Of Intentions You may love Google’s ability to give you quick access to movie reviews, camera price comparisons, and satellite maps of your next vacation spot. On the other hand, you may not be so crazy about the fact that it’s so easy for Google (and other search engines) to give someone your home address, phone number, and other potentially sensitive information. It’s not Google’s fault, of course. Search engines merely report what their crawlers find on the Internet. Still, search companies raise a lot of questions, especially when they get to be as large and as good at searching as Google. For example, what happens to the records of the keywords a particular user searches for? Over the years, according to John Batelle, author of “The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture,” such a log of terms become a “database of intentions.” 6 www.smartcomputing.com / Guide To Using Google A LL A BOUT G OOGLE cached content links also proved useful. The company preserves recent Web content even when the original server is down or the content has been pulled or changed. In fact, Google set up a link during the Sept. 11, 2001, disasters to provide cached online news at a time when most Internet news sites were overwhelmed by traffic (the Google News aggregation feature sprouted from this event). Obviously, caching demands data centers with huge storage capacity, reliable servers, and lots of bandwidth. Although it started out with Linux, Google eventually wound up customizing an OS to suit its specific needs. The company also opted for a distributed computing model using thousands of networked computers made of off-the-shelf parts rather than a few expensive “big iron” servers. This type of parallel computing makes it cheaper to add servers later, and easier to swap out failed parts without affecting the speed of the overall network. Google’s legend grew, but the fledgling company still needed a way to make money. Although Brin and Page remained distrustful of ads, they reasoned that ad revenue would keep Google free for anyone to use. Using AdWords, launched in October 2000, “What does the world want?” Batelle asks. “Build a company that answers this question in all its shades of meaning, and you’ve unlocked the most intractable riddle of marketing, of business, and arguably of human culture itself. And over the past few years, Google seems to have built just that company.” Such a database could become the Holy Grail for marketers, especially if Google ever decides that more overt commercialization of its companies paid for their ads to be related to particular search terms. Today, ad sales (on and offsite) and search engine licensing fuel Google’s revenues. Some Work, Some Play “Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s unofficial motto. The phrase was distilled by engineer Paul Buchheit during a committee meeting meant to define Google’s core values, Batelle says. It seemed to Buchheit that “don’t be evil” was the common factor of several slogans being bandied about, and in typical engineer fashion, cut to the chase with the most efficient solution. For more on Google’s philosophy and culture, check out “The Way Of Google” on page 13. Already an anomaly in the often staid corporate world, Google loves to flaunt its sense of whimsy. On holidays and even some obscure anniversaries such as Van Gogh’s birthday, the logo on the home page gets a fun makeover (www .google.com/holidaylogos.html). Each April Fools’ Day spawns new jokes, such as the revelation that pigeons are the secret behind PageRank (www.goo gle.com/technology/pigeonrank.html). And the languages in Google’s repertoire include Elmer Fudd and Pig Latin (www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en). technology isn’t so “evil” after all. But it could also end up a tool of the courts or government agencies to keep an eye on citizens, rationalized by the need to sniff out potential criminals and terrorists under legislation such as the PATRIOT Act. “For now, Google cofounder Sergey Brin has assured me, such demands are neither made nor met,” Batelle says. “But in the face of such power, how long can that stand?” ❙
Google Searches Per Day 2,400 2,000 1,600 1,200 800 600 200 80 40 0 Aug. to Dec. 1998 More paternalistic companies take a dim view of what might be construed as time-wasting nonsense, but Google has found that a sense of play pays off in employee happiness and fresh ideas. Speaking of ideas, Google employees are advised to spend part of their time working on side projects, some of which appear as beta features in Google Labs (labs.google.com) and go on to become permanent features, such as Google News and Gmail. Wolves At The Door Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are Google’s chief foes in search, as we’ve shown in Google Timeline ‘96 August 1996: The first version of Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google appears on Stanford University’s site ‘98 Sept. 7, 1998: Google incorporates in Menlo Park, Calif. Feb. to June 1999 Sept. 1999 (in millions) .01 .5 3.5 18 40 June 2000 Early 1999: ‘99 Red Hat becomes Google’s first commercial customer Sept. 2000 A LL A BOUT G OOGLE 60 Dec. 2000 70 Feb. 2001 200 May 2003 2,317 *May 2005 Source: Google * Source: Nielsen/Net Ratings, Searchenginewatch.com the “Web Search Engine Market Shares” chart in this article. A newer contender is Become.com, an online shopping search site. Its senior director of product search and comparison shopping, Jon Glick, has competed with Google for years—arguably, even before there was a Google to compete against. He’s a former product management head from Yahoo! and was a director of Internet search at both online ad sales service Overture (formerly GoTo) and AltaVista, the “clean interface” search darling of the mid-1990s. “Starting in 1999, Google enjoyed five years of unquestioned technological leadership,” Glick says. “Their challenge April 27, 2000: Wireless search for WAP (Wireless Application Protocols) phones and handhelds May 9, 2000: Google goes multilingual with support for French, German, Spanish, and seven other tongues June 26, 2000: Google becomes the world’s largest search index with more than 1 billion pages; Yahoo! enlists Google as its search engine Oct. 23, 2000: AdWords sells advertising keyed to search terms, soon becoming Google’s primary source of income ‘00 going forward is that rivals such as Yahoo! have caught up, and next generation systems like Become.com’s AIR (Affinity Index Ranking) technology have shown the ability to outperform Google on many searches.” Glick says that Become.com’s AIR search extrapolates more meaning from the context of linking sites than does Google’s PageRank, especially for users looking to buy. (Of course, shoppers might use Froogle, not Google proper.) “For a search on ‘television’ Google returns TV stations, while the productfocused search on Become.com returns information on TVs because we know that’s what our users are looking for,” Glick says. Leaving aside the competition, not everyone loves Google. Batelle’s research uncovered tales of an online shopkeeper who lost his high ranking during one of Google’s algorithm adjustments and suspected that commercial results were ranked lower to drive business to AdWords; job applicants, advertisers, and ordinary Web users resentful of Google’s unresponsiveness to communications (indeed, Google declined repeated invitations to comment for this article); and the perspectives of technological forerunners, erstwhile partners, and former employees. And in 2004, the apparently self-righteous Google bowed to the Web-censoring Chinese government and removed links to banned sites in its local edition of Google News. Even with relatively “pure” motives and the motto “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has March 26, 2001: Dr. Eric Schmidt becomes chairman of Google’s board of directors; later becomes CEO on August 6. Unlike a traditional CEO, to date he runs the company with founders Brin and Page, much to Wall Street’s consternation July to August 2001: Google Image Search launches; Google Zeitgeist lists top search terms September 2001: A link to cached news articles about the 9/11 tragedies eventually becomes Google News October 2001: Google reaches profitability Dec. 11, 2001: Google adds searchable index of non-HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) files, such as PDF (Portable Document Format) and MS Office documents ‘01 Reference Series / Guide To Using Google 7
Page 3 and 4: Guide To Using TABLE OF CONTENTS RE
Page 5 and 6: 145 Google Hacking How Hackers Use
Page 7: Google not to waste their time with
Page 11 and 12: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE Find The Digita
Page 13 and 14: 7| Catalogs Many retailers let cust
Page 15 and 16: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE The Way Of Goog
Page 17 and 18: more than a Google user’s misgivi
Page 19 and 20: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE Test Drive Thes
Page 21 and 22: Phone, you just highlight the text
Page 23 and 24: processing power to Folding@home (f
Page 25 and 26: A LL A BOUT G OOGLE How’d They Do
Page 27 and 28: it easily. Click the Toolbar’s Go
Page 29 and 30: Placement in Google’s search resu
Page 31 and 32: are not highlighted in the search r
Page 33 and 34: T HE S EARCH One In A Billion Advan
Page 35 and 36: specific results. You can, for inst
Page 37 and 38: T HE S EARCH Image Search Elements
Page 39 and 40: Google will omit most explicit imag
Page 41 and 42: evolved over time. To read coverage
Page 43 and 44: Greyhounds, and Environmental Engin
Page 45 and 46: any part of the product description
Page 47 and 48: price between which to search, we h
Page 49 and 50: est combination of usefulness and p
Page 51 and 52: You remember Mr. Know-It- All. Mayb
Page 53 and 54: account profile for this informatio
Page 55 and 56: afford to promote all of their titl
Page 57 and 58: T HE S EARCH Are We There Yet? Goog
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plenty of detail for planning trips
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As a scholarly research tool, Googl
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T HE S EARCH Boutique Searches Spec
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to result in plenty of information
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the upper-right corner of the page.
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emails to and from the same person
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apply any label you’ve created to
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second text box, and click Send Cod
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What do an Indonesian acoustic guit
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Sign In link, enter your email addr
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also called newsgroups, resemble vi
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Search By Numbers a comprehensive m
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Low-tech text messaging? Meet the h
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On a Motorola MPX220, text messagin
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(also free) to organize them. If yo
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and stare at it. To return to Hello
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card, AutoFill completes your addre
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page to perform a Google search. Ty
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Search Engine Jr. Google Brings Its
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(an undocked search box). This page
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G OOGLE T OOLS Meet Blogger Join Th
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sign in at the top of the page to a
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By setting up a Mail-to-Blogger add
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To allow any reader, even someone w
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You can view buildings for dozens o
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available to free version users. Yo
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www.microsoft.com) covers a lot of
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To fix red-eye, click and drag over
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Focus, Glow, and Focal B&W, you can
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Google In Your Language & Domain In
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Könguló. It’s Icelandic for “
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THE B USINESS E ND Most of us think
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esults within your budget. It also
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programs rather than manual labor t
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You may be surprised at who links t
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T HE B USINESS E ND Give Your Web S
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etween the checked> and tags, howe
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T HE B USINESS E ND The Ins & Outs
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Google’s Not The Only Game In Tow
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Aproductive company can no longer b
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information that’s at different l
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Web site asks visitors to supply da
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T HE B USINESS E ND Beyond Classifi
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of service as its largest, but we d
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about known flaws in that particula
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JUST F OR F UN Agog About Googlewha
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dictionary and run your fingers dow
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Looking for popcorn machine on T hi
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Keep in mind that there are a coupl
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Get Fit Sit Anywhere Bean Bag Item
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Millions of Internet users love Goo
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