Google is the most popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Through its website and client websites, such as AOL, Google receives at least 200 million search requests per day. Google has its headquarters (called the "Googleplex") in Mountain View, California, USA.
In addition to web pages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news sites, and items for sale online. As of June 2004, Google 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.
"To google", as a verb, has come to mean "to search for something on Google;" because of Google's popularity (80% of all web users, perhaps) it has also generically come to mean "to search the web." Google officials have expressed discouragement for this usage of their company name, as it could lead to their name becoming a genericized trademark.
PageRank and indexingGoogle 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, .txt, .doc, and .xls. 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. 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 optimizationSince Google is the most popular search engine, 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. One technique commonly used is google bombing in which many sites link to another site through a particular word, in order to give the site a high ranking when the word is searched for. 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 particular page 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 [1] for a website's owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants.Other Google services\nGoogle Groups (Usenet) & Google Images\nGoogle 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 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 NewsGoogle introduced a beta release 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. The Google News services can also be customised for the country that you are from (jump to Google News Country Links).Google Answers\nIn 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.Froogle\nIn 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\nOn April 1, 2004, Google announced its own free webmail service, Gmail, which would provide users with 1000 megabytes 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. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, re-assured BBC News by saying "We are very serious about Gmail." The service is set to allow up to 1000 MB of storage space. When Gmail was announced, this was vastly more than that of most other free webmail providers—for example, Microsoft's Hotmail only offered 2 MB, and Yahoo's Mail service offered 4 MB. In response to Gmail, these limits have been upgraded, to 250 MB for Hotmail and 100 MB for Yahoo. Other webmail providers have followed suit, some of them now offering larger storage than Gmail. As of July 10, 2004, the service was being tested internally. It is not known when will the service be available to the public. However, the service is available to Blogger users and by invitation from current Gmail users. However, the invites system has led to gmail invites being exchanged for cash and goods through websites like Gmail swap, making Google change its policy on invites by disallowing cash exchanges. There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy. Much of the controversy involved the 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." Many believed that this meant that Google would intentionally archive copies of deleted mail forever. Google later stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical." Most of the criticism, however, was against Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to e-mails by automatically scanning them.Google Web API\nThe 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, as well as the Google Dance Tool, which monitors when Google is spidering the Internet.Orkut\nThough not mentioned on the Google homepage, Orkut is a service hosted, created and maintained by Google engineers. Orkut is a relationship database, where users can list their personal and professional information, create relationships amongst friends and join communities of mutual interest. There is some speculation saying that Orkut and Gmail are part of a Google effort to gather information about their users, with the intention of offering a better personalized search service in future. Google already has a personalized search in Google Labs.Other tools\n*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.\n*AdSense allows web site owners to display Google ads on their site that generate income every time a visitor clicks. The service uses Google's relevance technology to match the ads to the content of the pages they are displayed on.\n*Google provides experimental machine translation services between several languages.\n*Google includes a calculator and units converter, see below.\n*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.\n*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.\n*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.\n*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\nGoogle Toolbar\nThis 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 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 has also been built into Safari for Apple Computer's new OS X operating system.Google Deskbar\nIn 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 GoogleWhile 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, DC warned that "As courts become more frequent integrators of electronic records, there is a greater risk of Google ... becoming a serious privacy threat."Claims of partialityIn 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[1]. A Google bomb was employed to place 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. [1] 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 censorshipSites 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 hardcore pornographic sites have remained unaffected, however, and web-filtering programs have no effect on searches run from Google's Image section.Claims of privacy invasionIt 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.Criticisms of PageRank systemGoogle'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.Books\n*Google Hacks from O'Reilly & Associates is a book containing tips about using Google effectively.PuffinGoogle is reportedly working on a downloadable tool, code-named Puffin, for searching local files,Related articles\n*List of websites\n*Dennis Hwang\n*Peter Norvig\n*Link popularity\n*Google Watch\n*Googlewhack\n*Search engineExternal links\nGoogle.com links\n* Google\n* Google News (active beta)\n* Froogle product search engine (active beta)\n* Google Directory\n* Google Print (beta) (Example)\n* Google Store\n* AdWords\n* AdSense\n* Gmail (private beta)\n* Google Labs (a testing ground for Google services that are in beta)\n* Google Groups 2\n* Official Google weblog\n* googlesyndication.com - Official Google mirror\n* Early Google.com - Google as on November 11, 1998 from Internet ArchiveOther national Googles\n1. American Samoa,\n2. Anguilla,\n3. Antigua and Barbuda,\n4. Argentina,\n5. Australia,\n6. Austria,\n7. Azerbaijan,\n8. Belgium,\n9. Brazil,\n10. British Virgin Islands,\n11. Burundi,\n12. Canada,\n13. Chad,\n14. Chile,\n15. Colombia,\n16. Costa Rica,\n17. Côte d'Ivoire,\n18. Cuba,\n19. Dem. Rep. of the Congo,\n20. Denmark,\n21. Djibouti,\n22. Dominican Republic,\n23. Ecuador,\n24. El Salvador,\n25. Federated States of Micronesia,\n26. Fiji,\n27. Finland,\n28. France,\n29. The Gambia,\n30. Georgia,\n31. Germany,\n32. Gibraltar,\n33. Greece,\n34. Greenland,\n35. Guernsey,\n36. Honduras,\n37. Hong Kong,\n38. Hungary,\n39. India,\n40. Ireland,\n41. Isle of Man,\n42. Israel,\n43. Italy,\n44. Jamaica,\n45. Japan,\n46. Jersey,\n47. Kazakhstan,\n48. Korea,\n49. Latvia,\n50. Lesotho,\n51. Liechtenstein,\n52. Lithuania,\n53. Luxembourg,\n54. Malawi,\n55. Malaysia,\n56. Malta,\n57. Mauritius,\n58. México,\n59. Montserrat,\n60. Namibia,\n61. Nepal,\n62. Netherlands,\n63. New Zealand,\n64. Nicaragua,\n65. Norfolk Island,\n66. Pakistan,\n67. Panamá,\n68. Paraguay,\n69. Perú,\n70. Philippines,\n71. Pitcairn Islands,\n72. Poland,\n73. Portugal,\n74. Puerto Rico,\n75. Rep. of the Congo,\n76. Romania,\n77. Russia,\n78. Rwanda,\n79. Saint Helena,\n80. San Marino,\n81. Singapore,\n82. Slovakia,\n83. South Africa,\n84. Spain,\n85. Sweden,\n86. Switzerland,\n87. Taiwan,\n88. Thailand,\n89. Trinidad and Tobago,\n90. Turkey,\n91. Ukraine,\n92. United Arab Emirates,\n93. United Kingdom,\n94. Uruguay,\n95. Uzbekistan,\n96. Vanuatu,\n97. Venezuela,\n98. Vietnam All of these Google sites produce nearly the same search results, though they may be in a different order. Illegal sites are censored in localized versions of Google, such as domain "whitepower.com" in Google Germany. National Google sites allow users to search on a global basis or just for sites from that country. Some countries may have different default language settings.Google News Country Links\n* Australia\n* Canada\n* France\n* Germany\n* India\n* Italy\n* New Zealand\n* Spain\n* U.K.\n* U.S.Google calculatorExamples (the link texts are what is entered as if it were a search string):Sites about Google\n* Google Fight - instantly compare two search queries\n* Google Blogoscoped\n* The Unofficial Google Directory - collection of tools and resources\n* Google World - a directory to find any type of information about the world according to Google\n* The Unofficial Google Fan Club\n* Google Watch China Organization\n* Google Watch (Why we nominated Google for the 2003 U.S. corporate Big Brother of the Year)\n* Google IPO Coverage\n* Google News\n* Logoogle.com - Google LogosGoogle parodies\n* Cthuugle Search Fhtagn! The complete HP Lovecraft Search Engine\n* elgooG the elgooG Search Engine simple:Google zh-cn:Google Category:Google |
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\nGoogle employs server farms of 