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!"
Why another five years? Do we not want a better search engine to come along? Google is nice and all, but if someone can come up with something better... Well, I'd prefer that.
the article states 200 million queries a day, not 200,000 million (200 billion) queries as the slashdot post says.
Well, that's just about the Google-ist thing I've ever heard!
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
What OTHER search engine do you still use, and why?
What about a fscking link??
Where can I find this Google company?
To be used as a pronoun!
At last, my sig is relevant to a story!
Let's see, today's total is:
Results 1 - 10 of about 344,000,000. Search took 0.10 seconds.
Not bad.
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.
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.
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
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.
I would guess that living under the law of the DMCA will eventually be the downfall of Google.
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.
Since google is the most popular search engine out there, they have the power to "remove" you from the internet. If someone at google headquarters decides to remove you from the search results, you don't exist. I know this debate is old but maybe some restrictions should be enforced since they hold much power, some would say too much.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
That song is protected by copyright. Please send your royalty cheque to the RIAA.
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
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.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
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 !
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 :))
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.
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.
A boss at work has observed that if WW III were to hit and Google survived they would probibly worship the thing. heh
So, why hell didn't anyone tell me about Google in 1998?! God damn... back then I was using HotBot... oh the pain... the horror.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
google-watch-watch
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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.
Here is the cache for it
;)
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
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?
In case that gets here's Google's cached verson.
My favorite line is:Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.
something i'm still missing at google are 'file searches'. lets say i know a name of the file and would like to find some ftp servers that still have it. how i do that with google?
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.
The 'prenatal' Google was already being discussed on netnews in March 1998. [more history]
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();
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!
Lets hope that they can live to be a googol (10^100)
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!
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.
/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
Here's the request it sends; if you duplicate it with telnet or whatever, it really will spit out slashdot's pagerank:
GET
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!
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!
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...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
before that, archie, veronica and jughead.
... hi bingo
Do you remember the "bad old days" before SEs and the Internet? We often recall an article of news that may be relevant to a discussion with friends and colleagues. We want to retrieve the article, but we have already forgotten the title (or worse) the source of the article. With a SE, you can now find the article via the Internet. Many of the relevant articles shall remain on the Internet for a long time.
In general, any reasonably educated person (i. e. a person who distinguishes reputable news sources from unreputable news sources) can now have ready access to high-quality information about almost any subject of interest. Just go to the SE and do a search. In this way, SEs and the Internet benefit society greatly. Now, we can more intelligently make decisions about the actions of governments and whole societies since we can easily retrieve and review the previously read information that is necessary for those decisions. Agents of deception seeking to manipulate, for example, American society and American government will be defeated. With the power of the SEs and the Internet, we can more easily distinguish lies from truths.
A case in point is "Reality of Taiwan". I was able to retrieve key information that might have been lost in the "bad old days" before the SEs and the Internet. Using the retrieved information (which comes from reputable Western sources), I constructed an accurate image of Taiwan. This image is the same one that senior government officials have contructed in the highest echelons of the American government. The image is quite shocking to the general American public, which Taiwanese agents (including paid lobbyists, Taiwanese politicians, etc.) have long manipulated.