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A search engine founded in 1998 by Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, Two students at stanford university. Google was a
comparatively late entrant to an already crowded market , but it has rapidly
grown to become the largest and most visited search engine on the web. Its
success is largely due to some clever search algorithms and a unique
page-ranking system that ranks sites on their popularity with other site
owners as well as simple keywords, by way of an equation that it
claims uses 500m variables. At the beginning of 2003 Google had indexed more
than 3 billion urls, making it the largest publicly accessible repository of
web information, and was responding to 150m search requests every day.
Much
of Google's popularity stems from its sparse, uncluttered design and its
consistent ability to deliver more relevant results than its competitors.
although it originally concentrated on indexing the web alone, it now
includes features for searching 425m images, over 700m usenet posts
dating back over 20 year' and tens of millions of non-html documents
such as pdf files and telephone numbers for every city in America.
Such is its presence that in a 2003 survey by brandchannel.com, an
Interbrand company, it was rated as the world's top brand ahead of much
longer established companies including Coca-Cola and Apple. Some of its fans
have expressed concerns about the rapid expansion of the company into areas
that they say dilute the purity of its search function, such as a news
service and various shopping features. |
