Slashdot Mirror
Google Turns 5
Gantic writes "The BBC has an article on Google's 5th birthday. The popular search engine now handles over 200 million queries a day and the word "Google" is now a noun, adjective and verb. Lets see how long the most popular search engine in the world can last, here's to another 5 years and more Google!"
the article states 200 million queries a day, not 200,000 million (200 billion) queries as the slashdot post says.
Probably the whole UK/US billion thing (although the UK billion = 10^12 is only rarely used now, as far as I've seen)
I think google's great, but just to counter the usual fan boy posts here is a link to some people who don't think so:google-watch
Google has added a calculator function to it's primary search page. Simply type in 4*6 or (9+13)/7 into the search box and out pops the answer. Unit conversions (i.e. "how many inches in a lightyear") are performed as well. And if that wasn't enough, simply type in "the answer to life, the universe and everything" for a calculation that takes significantly less time than seven and a half million years. A nice plug for Google's computing power being equivalent to Deep Thought of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
google-watch-watch
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Any search engine I feel like using at the moment, and this is why.
The only time I ever use google is if I absolutely can not find what I want on other search engines.
Ok the reason that the word billion is not used is becuase the word is incorrectly used in america to represent 1000 million. A billion is actually 1,000,000 million. And is used as such in many countries. On an internationally read website it makes sence not to use this term. A "billion" is a relatively new word. It comes from the Italian and is first found as bimillion, bilioni, and byllion. It originally meant a million million, and in England and Germany it still does. That is the meaning of the prefix bi: two "million" written side by side and meaning a million million.
(C)2003 Google - Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages
Alltheweb:
Currently searching 3,151,743,117 web pages
That said, who cares about index size if the search engine doesn't return pages that you actually want?
It's a hack of the URL.
e =UTF-8&q=msn&num=-1&btnG=Google+Search
F -8&q=msn&btnG=Google+Search
Original posts URL:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
A URL returned from a query from the google homepage:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT
note the num=-1 in the original post URL.
One thing I'm not sure of is why new searches in the search box from the original URL return a num=0 instead of whatever number you have set as the number of results you wish to see on google, but it seems like a small bug because of the original badly formed url given to it.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
Funny, it works for me. Maybe if you didn't have "&num=-1" in the URL string, it would work for you too.
The 'prenatal' Google was already being discussed on netnews in March 1998. [more history]
Altavista Image Search because its results are sometimes better (and more) than those of the correspondent Google thing.
I'm blue...
Their new toolbar is great (when I'm stuck on IE). Forms autofill, popup blocking, and even the ability to vote a site up or down. Hmm... site to vote down... of course, sco.com!
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
So does Google. The second result for scientology is xenu.net. The first result for KaZaA Lite is kazaalitekpp.com. And the first eight results for a decss search are all pages offering the DeCSS code.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.