How Google conquered the world

Is Google God?

Laugh if you want, but columnist Thomas Friedman asked exactly that question recently in The New York Times. Like a deity, said Friedman, Google apparently “sees and knows everything,” which is why it’s far and away the first place people turn when seeking information on the Internet. Every day, Google processes over 200 million search requests, scanning an index of more than 3 billion Web pages in an average of 0.2 seconds. Google searches in 36 different languages, and can, if you like, show its home page in Klingon or pig Latin. In addition to Web pages, Google can find images, news stories, phone numbers, stock quotes, mathematical sums, dictionary definitions, and the best price on a new sewing machine. “Our mission is to organize the world’s information,” says co-founder Larry Page.

How does it work?

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The basic methodology is simple enough. Google’s omniscient brain now consists of 54,000 servers—perhaps the largest computing system in the world. Periodically, Google dispatches its Web crawlers to copy vast sections of the Web and store them in its memory. When you do a search, it’s those copied Web pages that Google looks through. The innovation that propelled Google to the top of the search-engine pile is the way it sorts results. With a system called PageRank, Google lists Web sites in order of importance and popularity, as determined by how many other sites link to it. The exact algorithm Google uses to determine which results to show first for any given search is a closely guarded secret. But the bottom line is that Google sorts the Web in a way that people are likely to find most useful.

Who came up with that idea?

As you might expect, two college kids. Google began in 1995 as a graduate project of 20-something Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The name comes from “googol,” the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros—a whimsical way of signaling how much information Google hoped to catalog. In 1998 Page and Brin tried to sell their technology to several existing search engines—including Yahoo, Excite, and Infoseek—and were turned away. While they were explaining their software to a founder of Sun Microsystems one morning, the man stopped them halfway and wrote a $100,000 check to Google Inc. It sat in a drawer for several weeks while Page and Brin hurriedly formed a company by that name.

How big is the company now?

Google has 1,000 employees in its four-building Northern California headquarters. The atmosphere is famously easygoing, and perks include complimentary massages, pool and ping-pong tables, an ice cream bar, and free organic meals prepared by the former chef for the Grateful Dead. Employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on any outside activity. This may sound like the heyday of the dot-com bubble, but unlike so many defunct Internet ventures, Google actually makes money.

How does it do that?

Partly by licensing its technology—Yahoo now runs on Google, and numerous large sites, such as CNN.com, use it. But much of Google’s profits come from its innovative advertising service, which auctions keywords to the highest bidder and displays ads (kept distinct from search results) finely tuned to each search. Mostly through ads, Google will earn an estimated $600 million to $800 million this year. If the company went public, which it has no plans to do, it could be worth about $5 billion. How Google would fare in the face of serious competition is hotly debated. Yahoo is expected to end its partnership with Google next year and challenge it using a rival search technology. That has led to speculation that Google will sell itself to Microsoft for protection. If it doesn’t, Microsoft may launch its own anti-Google. But most analysts say Google is too good and has too big a lead to worry.

Is there anything Google can’t do?

Lots. The “Google Gap,” says Alex Salkever in BusinessWeek, is “the difference between the growing perception that the site is omniscient and the fact that it isn’t.” Google searches 3 billion pages, but that’s now only half of the entire Web. And most of human knowledge is still recorded in books, which may never be online. There are other “Googleholes.” Because so many of the Web sites people create are dedicated to shopping or technology, PageRank gives disproportionate weight to these topics. “Search for ‘flowers,’ and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists,” says Steven Johnson in Slate.com. But what worries some people is not that Google doesn’t find everything—it’s that it finds too much.

What’s wrong with that?

As more and more public and quasi-public information goes online, your past is largely transparent to anyone with a computer. “Perhaps you once went on a rant at a selectmen’s meeting, or signed a petition without stopping to read it. Or maybe you endured a bitter divorce,” says Neil Swidy in The Boston Globe. “You may think those chapters are closed. Google begs to differ.” Theoretically, court and other legal records, police arrests, obscure newspaper articles, and other such documents have always been publicly available. But an enormous amount of time, effort, and expertise was needed to dig them up. Now, with a couple of keystrokes, a lifetime’s worth of records can unfold on someone’s computer screen in 0.2 seconds. “It’s the collapse of inconvenience,” says professor Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University. “It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn’t realize it.”

Is Google Big Brother?

BBCnews.com.

Google-watch.org.