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.
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?
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.
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.
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 !
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!
blog & fiction: jd87
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
google-watch-watch
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Here is the cache for it
;)
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
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.
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)
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!