Somewhat Off-Topic: Google

[...]

"Until that day I'd been fond of passing along the old quip, "the
Internet is like a huge library with the books scattered all over the floor." It seemed every time I'd query a search engine it would spit back an enormous list of citations in which life-insurance companies, smut merchants and pranksters had equal or greater billing with sites that sometimes had something like what I was looking for.

Since that day I've joined the ranks of the goo-goo for Google. It's "an amazing research tool ... the best writers' resource ever offered," to Tribune computer columnist Jim Coates; "Simply the best search site I've ever used ... a beacon in a sea of confusion," in the view of Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg; "The first choice, no doubt," says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.com, an independent review site that crowned Google No. 1 earlier this year.

It's free to use and ads don't clutter Google's home page. The company says it has 10,000 servers holding 1.6 billion archived Web pages, and that programs analyze these pages in a variety of ways--including and especially the number and quality of other pages that link to them--to establish the credibility and possible relevance of each page.

"No humans are involved," said spokesman David Krane. "All
searches are totally objective, unlike with some of our competitors who let sponsors buy their way to top of certain searches."

Google--a variation of "googol," a word meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros--was designed by Stanford University grad students and went online in 1998. It's privately held and makes money selling targeted ads on results pages and selling its technology to companies that offer site-specific searches, Krane said."

[...]

Here's the rest of the article about the world's best search engine:

http://chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0111220202nov22.colu mn?coll=chi%2Dnews%2Dcol Received on Sat Nov 24 21:05:00 2001