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

Do you use another?

[Futurepower(R)]

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

Re:Do you use another?

[Organized Konfusion]

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.

Re:Do you use another?

[mindriot]

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.

Innovation keeps them up . . .

[shamitbagchi]

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 !

Google Toolbar

[FsG]

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?