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!"

Comments

google censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

While I normally have nothing but praise for google, there have been a number of recent censorship issues which one should be mindful of. Google is a privately own company, based on profit, don't forget it.

That said, thankfully you can still type "google censorship" into google itself and get a heap of results. The force may be strong with this one.... but it was strong with Vader also.

Re:google censorship

[Sphere1952]

I'm very impressed with the way google is handling the whole DMCA crap. They are adhering strictly to the law in order that they not be the butt of a lawsuit, but they are also making a mockery of the law.

It is google policy to: "...document all notices of alleged infringement on which we act. A copy of the notice will be sent to a third party who will make it available to the public."

The third party is the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, and Google puts up a statement at the bottom of the page pointing at this notice. Since the notice has to list the specific sites to be removed, there is a nice list of all the removed sites -- and who wanted them removed.

If this isn't giving the DMCA the finger then what is?

Tech beats marketing

[j_dot_bomb]

The thing that makes feel good about google is that it is a company that is so driven by what tech people think would be useful to people rather than by MBA marketer types who seem to want popups and cluttered image filled pages. Employees spend 1/3 of their time just creating new wild ideas. I wish I was good enough to work there.

Remember when they bought the Dejanews archive?

[mfarah]

Man, we've come a long way. Back when they bought the Dejanews Usenet archive, all comments I saw were of the "Who are these guys?"-"What do they want with our beloved archive?"-"Will they keep it public or they'll make it a paid service?"-"Is their search engine any good?" kind.

Now we take its groups search feature for granted, we think nothing of other search engines (Yahoo!, anyone?) and we use Google to search for images (back in MY day, those were the hardest to search, having to search and download lots of stuff from ftp sites and then discard the junk).

I love Google.

Re:Google is good but dangerous as well

[smart.id]

They don't just remove people for no reason, and they certainly wouldn't do it for their own vendettas. Google has shown that they believe in free speech. In the past, the only reason they've censored their results is because of cease and desist letters claiming DMCA violations (usually from big companies). Besides, you could always use MSN, with their Fair and Balaced(TM) results!