Google

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Google is an Internet search engine founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, who developed a technologically advanced method for finding information on the Internet. As of 2002, it was the most popular search engine.

The word "Google" is a play on the word 'googol', which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of 'importance'. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses some other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists.

Google employs a farm of more than 10,000 GNU/Linux computers to answer search requests and to index the web about once a month (news sites are indexed more often). The index database is several terabytes in size.

Google also has experimental machine translation services (see link below), as well as an image search function.

Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines, enabling them to track a user's search terms over time. However, most of Google's services can be used with cookies disabled.

In 2002, there were news reports that the Google search engine had been banned in China. A mirror site (in all respects, including mirrored text, see link below) called elgooG proved useful to get around the ban.

Google

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