|
 I’ve
had very positive feedback on my search engines piece in
Issue 26 (July 2001),
particularly my enthusiastic endorsement of
Google, so I thought you might be
interested in some more facts about our favourite search engine.
Founded
in 1998 by two graduate students at Stanford University,
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it has gradually become the
search tool of choice for millions of devoted Web surfers,
largely because of its remarkable speed and accuracy.
Since my
earlier article, the number of daily searches Google services has
continued to climb, yet it still manages to return relevant results in
less than half a second. Mind you, it uses a staggering 10,000 linked
server computers, which no doubt also contribute to its speed in indexing:
each day three million pages are re-indexed.
Another
valuable addition to its arsenal of tools has been the facility to search
the text of pages in Adobe’s PDF format and in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint
and RTF formats. At present Google is the only general-purpose search
engine that does so.
And not
only that, either. You can now use the Google interface in your language
of choice. There are so far over 60 languages available, including
Afrikaans, Basque, Hindi, Vietnamese and Welsh. Moreover, it offers
translation of search results from any of the major European languages to
another.
Not
willing to rest on its impressive statistics for text searching, however,
Google has now added an image search capability, with access to 150
million digital images.
Yes, the
best is getting better by the week.
Should
you be wondering, by the way, it gets its name from the mathematics term
googol, which means 1 followed by 100 zeroes. |
