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: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.

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.

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 !

Re:More Google ...

[Anonymous Coward]

jeeze, all this censorship stuff and chilling effects of DMCA..... and now a calculator.

I guess that makes google cold AND calculating.

Just in case...

[evil-osm]

Here is the cache for it

;)

Re:Hello, editors??!

[puppet10]

It's a hack of the URL.

Original posts URL:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&q=msn&num=-1&btnG=Google+Search

A URL returned from a query from the google homepage:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=msn&btnG=Google+Search

note the num=-1 in the original post URL.

One thing I'm not sure of is why new searches in the search box from the original URL return a num=0 instead of whatever number you have set as the number of results you wish to see on google, but it seems like a small bug because of the original badly formed url given to it.