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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!"

26 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. before you switched to google ? by EpsCylonB · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I was using dogpile, and other engines that searched other engines.

    1. Re:before you switched to google ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I used to work for Google. Wait until you see what's coming out Jan 04.

      Not so much a search engine as a way of life...

      JediCEO

    2. Re:before you switched to google ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I use Yahoo, and have since I discovered the internet. I don't know why, it's just tradition.

      I was into Yahoo before anyone ever heard of it, and I actually had to BUY Mosaic to view it using a dial-up PPP account that also came with a free UNIX shell account (man was that fun! (no joke) I loved viewing URL's in text!)

      I have always stuck to Yahoo, even if nothing is free anymore (which still pisses me off to this day...everything should be free like the good ole days [3 years ago])...

    3. Re:before you switched to google ? by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      before that, archie, veronica and jughead.

      --
      ... hi bingo ...
  2. Do you use another? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What OTHER search engine do you still use, and why?

    1. Re:Do you use another? by Organized+Konfusion · · Score: 5, Interesting

      alltheweb. why? because they still have kazaa lite, anti-scientology and DeCSS links.
      Because they are European
      Because they have the biggest index of pages on the web.

    2. Re:Do you use another? by mindriot · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Alltheweb is quite good. But even there do you see the effects of Google. Just look at the page design and layout. Same thing goes for Altavista and even Yahoo! search.

      And I'm really, really glad that Google has this influence. Before Google, most search engines were getting cluttered with advertisements and nasty, slowly-loading designs (yes, that was when modems were prevalent). Google did the one right thing and focused on the important stuff, building a good and fast search engine with a pragmatic, to-the-point, minimalist design and about every function you'd need to find what you're looking for.

      That's why I love Google. And also, I for one never really had censoring problems with my searches. And what can Google do when others threaten them with lawsuits? It's those others that we should criticize, not Google itself... I'm rather glad when Google makes a small adjustment (though I don't like it either) that at least allows them to continue to exist instead of being driven out of money.

      But bringing up Alltheweb is also interesting in this regard; it shows that nobody can really stop the spread of information, whatever kind it is... if Google is sued, somebody else will link to KaZaA Lite. In this regard, the Web is like a Hydra for free information.

    3. Re:Do you use another? by alexo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > What OTHER search engine do you still use, and why?

      AllTheWeb, because they have a nice FTP search as well as audio and video searches.
      AltaVista, because they have better boolean and wildcard features as well as audio and video searches and a Google-like toolbar.

  3. Not the same by Quasar1999 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It may be 5 years old, but it's not the same as it was back in the day (say 2-3 years ago)... when it truely did 'google' the internet... Now it has all sorts of filters and junk.

    Do you remember when you could do a search for a file and it would return hidden ftp sites? Now I do a search for something and all I get are the top sponsored sites. I can't find anything useful using google anymore... all the darned links point to mainstream sites. At the first sign of a potential lawsuit google removes references to potentially offensive material... what good is a search engine that doesn't do a good search?

    At this time I can't find anything better than google, but I really hope something comes out that is, cuz I miss the good ol' days when I could actually find stuff on the net...

    --

    ---
    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
  4. Google in the future by overbyj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope Google can keep it up. This search engine is by far the best one out there. I use many, many times a day. My only fear for Google is what dooms many of the other search engines, that is, they sell out to the man. They become an advertising whore and make their searches completely worthless. A prime example of this is Microsoft. I know they are in the process of revamping their engine, but let's be honest, if they keep up the advertising whoring, nobody except the ignorant masses that use MSN as their ISP will use the engine.

    Stay true to the cause Google! You are the best.

    --
    No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
  5. Innovation keeps them up . . . by shamitbagchi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When Teoma etc came in I thought Google would be in for some tough competition - but everything has blown away in front of them - a case in study for technology and services analysts for years to come.

    Their PageRank technology is something that they have leveraged on . . .


    [PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

    Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query]

    Their continuing language translation initiative and innovative Google Labs keep up the momentum in their favour - searching now is heading for Google thats it, nothing else comes to mind !

    Also there have been amazingly few outages too on their side; as they add more and more pages to their cache and more services !

  6. Copernic by Reaper9889 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It got about 350 different search engiernes (like alltheweb.com (the second largest...)), divide into categories like Newsgroups (The only one I know there isn't where is Google :))

  7. Google is still a baby by Space+Coyote · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wow, five years and it's still only been around for less than half the time I've been on the Internet. Before that we had webcrawler, which we thought was the shit. Anybody remember webcrawler's old URL? I believe it was http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu. It was kick ass when it came out, like a version of Archie for teh web.

    --
    ___
    Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
  8. Re:More Google ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm impressed:

    sqrt(-1)

    Yields 'i' as it should.

    Groovy.

  9. Regular Expression Searches by jbs0902 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've now used Google for so long that I can't remember what I used before.

    However, when is Google going to let me use full Perl-style regular expression searching?

  10. Re:Hello, editors??! by presroi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is amazing.

    Under Win2k SP4/MSIE 6.0.2800.1106IC it crashes IEXPLORE.exe. I can reproduce it.

    Can anyone else reproduce this behavior on another PC?

  11. Re:More Google ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Not only that i^i returns 0.207879576.

    This seriously kicks ass.

  12. Penguin Computing by cpopin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I watched an article on the CBS "Sunday Morning" show where they interviewed Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page while sitting at the breakfast table absorbing my first cup of coffee when noticed stackes of boxes in their office labeled "Penguin Computing". That put a smile on my face!

    --
    -=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
  13. Indexing count by KoolDude · · Score: 2, Interesting


    3.1 billion web pages indexed

    A search for 'the' on Google gives 5,140,000,000 results, indicating their index is above 5 billion. The results are very interesting. Strangely, the first result is theonion.com, America's finest news service, indeed!

    --
    getSexySig(); /* returns sexy signature */
  14. Favorite google logos by d0n+quix0te · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Logos Celebrating the birthdays of Piet Mondrian and Claude Monet and earthday

    BTW, here the first goolge logo . Prior to that it was called Project Backrub back in the Stanford days.

    Looking forward to the launch of Froogle Cool!

  15. Re:a correction by antin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Suprising that the poster didn't think the number odd when they typed it.

    200 million is only one query per day, per American.

    200 billion is more like 30 queries a day for every man, women and child on this earth.

  16. Google Toolbar by FsG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've often wondered why, in all of the attempts to mimic google's toolbar, no one has ever reproduced the handy pagerank indicator; I began hacking at it, wondering if I'll be the first, only to run into a brick wall.

    Here's the request it sends; if you duplicate it with telnet or whatever, it really will spit out slashdot's pagerank:
    GET /search?client=navclient-auto&googleip=O;216.239.5 3.104;131&ch=53856195705&freshness_check=3f1eAVUrj Mj2meFfx-IZI&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=inf o:http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot%2Eorg%2F HTTP/1.1
    User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 1.1.70-big; Windows XP 5.1)
    Host: 216.239.53.104
    Pragma: no-cache
    Connection: keep-alive

    But there's a little program, the ch= field. That's a special hash of "http://slashdot.org," and if you don't send it, it doesn't work.

    So as I continue attempting to work out the algorithm for this mysterious hash, I wonder: why has Google gone to such great lengths to make sure nobody duplicates the toolbar's pagerank indicator? Would a copy of that feature for Mozilla's google toolbar really be so awful?

    --
    I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
  17. Re:Happy Birthday! by eyeye · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was on metacrawler before google.
    Google is great esp. with the newsgroups they rescued from deja.
    One thing though for the googleguy/gals reading (and i'm sure they are) please do something about the spam on google, I cant search for anything without fucking "kelkoo" appearing in the listings, they are doing a fantastic job of shitting all over google listings.
    Not just kelkoo either, search for houses and you get urls like www.buy-houses-property-homes.com and www.search-property-buy-cheap.com and a few others that all link to the same site, last time I checked the source code to one of these it was a js redirect - I thought google would have coded around that exploit by now.
    Ditto with the keywords seperated by dashes bollocks as in the examples above. Would anybody register those domains for any other reason than spamming search engines, they are hardly easy to tell someone about otherwise.
    My less tech savvy partner has allready noticed the amount of noise on google seems to be increasing over the signal.

    I did try alltheweb as I heard good things about it. It does return some other results but is also less accurate with its relevancy.

    --
    Bush and Blair ate my sig!
  18. Re:More Google ... by WCityMike · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Amusingly enough, the Google Calculator has read Douglas Adams.

    It also knows smoots.

    More fun here and here and here.

  19. I like www.Teoma.com by MikeCapone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They are my primary search engine. I just like their technology.

    I also feel that Google shouldn't be a complete monopoly (when is that ever good?) and that others who do good job should be encouraged.

    Alltheweb.com is quite good too...

  20. Re:More Google ... by at_18 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's even better:

    sin( arcsin(0.5))

    yelds 0.5

    It knows about hexadecimal too

    (try entering 0x2ff * 3)