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In Google We Trust
firstadopter.com writes "The New York Times (registration needed) writes about how far Google has penetrated our culture (soul sucking "Free" registration required) in the last six years with the pros and cons of its success. It's amazing to think 200 million searches are done on the search engine each day on an index of 6 billion pages."
Is whether Google will be able to hold onto their cool after they have their IPO and have to answer to shareholders...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
It is interesting, whenever I want any information I go straight to google and rarely consider other sources. How many people do this? Do you ever find better results with other search engines?
After all, Apple has, hasn't it?
The coolest voice ever.
The actual headline on the NY Times article is "In Searching We Trust", but Slashdot calling it "In Google We Trust" isn't that far off the mark since no other search engine is even mentioned in the piece.
Google isn't the only search engine out there, just the dominant one at the moment. Somebody who is using only Google, and is not aware that their are other tools with which to get a second opinion is missing out on a pretty big portion of the web that Google either hasn't discovered or just doesn't think highly of in PageRank.
I'm not religiously devoted to Google, I use it because I reckon it's the best search engine available. If something better comes along, I'd switch straight away.
Decode these
This is so untrue. Almost any computer savvy individual knows that google results are not very reliable. Google is just an online popularity contest. And it doesn't go very deep into the website structure. If you believe in google as your messiah, then you do really need to get your head checked.
As for the story about Left Handed Guitars, all I can say is it took google more than one month to include my site in their searches. So unless the guy did the search after one month, he would probably not have found them.
Google is not at all what it is hyped upto be. It has its uses, but it ain't the oracle my friend.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
google is a modification of the word googol
but pronounced virtually identically, so really its the other way round and it was already in use (since at least 1938) before google discovered its branding potential
To be honest, before I used firefox, or phoenix as it was called back then, I very rarely used google. However, since firefox has a built in 'google function' as I call it (this works by typing google [searchtopic] in the address bar and hitting enter) I must use it around 10 to 20 times a day.
Looking back on things, I don't know how I ever got anything done without firefox or google...
In my experience Google seems great for searching for popular items, but due to their ranking system if I want to perform an obscure search, my chances of finding anything are slim to none.
Apparently, the "deep web" is the best place to make obscure searches, and I've used turbo10.com to perform searches in this way. It's really interesting to compare the results of two searches between google and turbo10 - google certainly appears to be the quick and easy search engine that grandma can use, but for serious work, I am increasingly finding myself turning to the deep web.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Currently many interesting sites, such as wikipedia, everything2, groklaw, are spread by words-of-mouth (mostly on slashdot :) Surely many people has taken the pain to collect a set of links that is hopefully quite complete by the time of writing (which is much harder than simple googling), but such pages usually show up only in obscure places at google. Maybe the community can invent some way to make an easy-to-use distributed link-list service where everyone can easily share the results of their searching efforts.
The other day I had to look up a missed call from my cellphone. Now, there is a pretty good online phonebook for my country (Iceland), but the number was not found. So I googled it (yes, it has become a verb), and google found it. Turns out it was a direct line to an employee of a company (who's main number was registered in the phonebook). I use google every single day, life just wouldn't be the same without it.
That means less than you may think...after all Hoover doesn't have a monopoly on vacuum cleaners nor Kleenex has the market cornered on tissues. Google just happened to be the first effective, widely popular search engine just as the Web was becoming effectively mainstream: the switching costs are still essentially zero (just point your browser to a different URL), so any company that can deliver searches better *enough* than Google, can become the new Google. That's even more impressive IMHO...
I think the "next big thing" will be information only search engines. Filtering through the plethora of advertising and crud is getting more tiresome as the punters learn how to optimise their rankings. Something like Google but with a Bayesian spam filter attached to the front end to filter the results for me...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I've started using Teoma most of the time.
http://www.teoma.com/
It usually has what I'm looking for on the first page, not buried ten pages deep.
I'm using wikipedia now for my encyclopedia over google (which I used to use). I've also been looking for alternative searching systems but google still seems to be the best. I wouldn't put much stock in them staying on top after profit driven investors get to them. Froogle has been an interesting foray, I must say.
I thought it was 4,285,199,774 pages
Google has a record of every search your IP address has ever done... As soon as Google merges with an ISP or other entity that can coneect you with that IP address, your Google searching history will be laid bare.
I think Google really is an example of a large company that everyone can like. Other posts have already alluded to the attitude many have taken--not even thinking of other search engines when looking for information. With an index of over 6 Billion Pages it's almost impossible for anyone else to compete. But these facts are just the tip of the economic and creative iceberg. Through a proactive strategy, Google has become a symposium of services. Google News, Froogle, and partnerships with Dictionary.com and Blogger.com. When google created a tool bar (http://toolbar.google.com/), Yahoo and Microsoft followed. (Google's toolbar, FYI, has been the most successful--much to Microsoft's chagrin.) It's actually rather amazing that such an aggressive and successful company has remained free of so much of the controversy typical of similar corporations. Google really is a friendly giant.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
I remember reading somewhere on the Net (of course) a piece called something like "Google Ate My Brain" refering to the fact that you have to google to know something, and you can't rely on your existing knowledge. While it's great to be able to use Google for nearly everything you would like to know about, it has its sad counterpoints. One of the counterpoints could be the fact that you are more unsure if what you know about a thing really is right, and you have to google for the truly definitive answer. And another counterpoint could be the absence of deep knowledge on websites.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I wish google would stop passing the search words along with the URL when I click on a link. That's a privacy invasion.
What's worse, now I've started to receive spam that's addressed as 'from' people whose names I've looked up.
Other than that, I could worship at the temple of google happily. Except that they're planning to go public. Could someone please send me a list of other good engines? I want a couple backup places to check when google starts to suck.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
Indirectly, it does. According to some articles I've read (this month's Maximum PC, for example), PageRank will consider the presentation (bold, italic, font size, etc) of a word when assigning a weight to it. Think of it, sometimes it's a hint of how important a word is, and rating importance is what Google is all about.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
What if google suddently went down? Completely. Totally. Off-the-map down. I wonder how well the internet would route around the problem. Sure there are other search engines, but think of all the more subtle effects that might seen as a result.