Thursday, September 07, 2006
Googles getting old?
Google History.
According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation and a year later it was time to go looking for buyer or atleast a venture capitalist.
Amazingly enough they were friends with the founder of yahoo but he encouraged them to form their own. How silly was he? But they did find a venture capitalist in Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. So pressed for time and impressed with the technology of google as it was now called he just wrote them a cheque for $100,000 us on the spot
In 1998 google set up in a garage they leased of a friend and its three staff worked hard on the project, although google.com was still in beta it was receiving over 10,000 hits in a day. It was not long before they outgrew this little office and now with 8 employees they moved into a small office at a university and RED HAT the creators of an open source linux project signed on as their first cooperate search customer. This was because Google had committed itself to running its servers on a great open source operating system called LINUX.
In 1999 they removed the beta label of their search engine after the company moved to its new home which was affectionately called googleplex
How google searches?
Google has a technology called a Googlebot which is Google's web crawling robot. This program and hardware finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It's easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn't traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google's indexer.
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google's index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.
To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters).
This is different compared to other search engines that rely on what is called meta tags. Meta tags are hidden within the code in the website and often website creators in the early days were able to fool search engines by putting the incorrect meta tag information in the coding of the website. It became prevalent when adult sites kept appearing in searches which were not requesting such content. Google became popular because of its googlebot and google indexer technology actually looked at the content of the website not the meta tags and thus accurate provided the content requested.
It stores the information on the index servers in its massive database.
How a search is done?
When you access googles website and place a search request the web server accesses the index severs and then once it receives back the information displays the links to the sites that are appropriate. However, the index server also stores your search request and the response it gave you back, this sort of technology means that google is able to return information quicker than other search engines and more accurately.
What did we do before google?
Well we went to news papers for our news, we also relied more on written texts. However, the information received in print form could be anywhere from 6months to 3 years out of date before it arrived at the printing press. We then moved onto CD ROM technologies and then when the internet came along moved to search engines and websites, google has really just changed the way we look for information.
It interesting to note that there are hardly any printed format encyclopedias in book form these days rolling off the press, they are now either on DVD or subscription website.
Googles Limitations:
Google as in the search engine is only limited by the accuracy of the content it scans, it cannot guarantee the sites it displays to you contains accurate information about the search, only that it does match the search request you put into the system.
Google censorship:
Google is arguably the world's most popular search engine. However, contrary perhaps to a naive impression, in some cases the results of a search are affected by various government-related factors. That is, search results which may otherwise be shown, are deliberately excluded. The suppression may be local to a country, or global to all Google results.
A Google search is not simply a raw dump of a database query to the user's screen. The retrieval of the data is just one step. There is much post-processing afterwards, in terms of presentation and customization.
When Google "removes" material, often it is still in the Google index itself. But the post-processing has removed it from any results shown to the user. This system can be applied, for quality reasons, to remove sites which "spam" the search engine. And that is, by volume, certainly the overwhelming application of the mechanism. But it can also be directed against sites which have been prohibited for government-based reasons for example china’s political policies.
Googles future..
It’s a strong company launching new products and services, the search engine continues to grow in sized and strength and more googleplexes are built around the world. The latest googleplex is the size of four football fields and has cooling towers to remove the heat from its massive banks of servers. Google technologies are working on products like voice over IP, desktop search engines to find items on your own PC, google earth, google mars and many others. But recently their work with distributed computing projects which allow users who have downloaded a plug in for the google toolbar to turn their computer into part of massive super computer and work on university projects when your machine is idol.
According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation and a year later it was time to go looking for buyer or atleast a venture capitalist.
Amazingly enough they were friends with the founder of yahoo but he encouraged them to form their own. How silly was he? But they did find a venture capitalist in Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. So pressed for time and impressed with the technology of google as it was now called he just wrote them a cheque for $100,000 us on the spot
In 1998 google set up in a garage they leased of a friend and its three staff worked hard on the project, although google.com was still in beta it was receiving over 10,000 hits in a day. It was not long before they outgrew this little office and now with 8 employees they moved into a small office at a university and RED HAT the creators of an open source linux project signed on as their first cooperate search customer. This was because Google had committed itself to running its servers on a great open source operating system called LINUX.
In 1999 they removed the beta label of their search engine after the company moved to its new home which was affectionately called googleplex
How google searches?
Google has a technology called a Googlebot which is Google's web crawling robot. This program and hardware finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It's easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn't traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google's indexer.
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google's index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.
To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters).
This is different compared to other search engines that rely on what is called meta tags. Meta tags are hidden within the code in the website and often website creators in the early days were able to fool search engines by putting the incorrect meta tag information in the coding of the website. It became prevalent when adult sites kept appearing in searches which were not requesting such content. Google became popular because of its googlebot and google indexer technology actually looked at the content of the website not the meta tags and thus accurate provided the content requested.
It stores the information on the index servers in its massive database.
How a search is done?
When you access googles website and place a search request the web server accesses the index severs and then once it receives back the information displays the links to the sites that are appropriate. However, the index server also stores your search request and the response it gave you back, this sort of technology means that google is able to return information quicker than other search engines and more accurately.
What did we do before google?
Well we went to news papers for our news, we also relied more on written texts. However, the information received in print form could be anywhere from 6months to 3 years out of date before it arrived at the printing press. We then moved onto CD ROM technologies and then when the internet came along moved to search engines and websites, google has really just changed the way we look for information.
It interesting to note that there are hardly any printed format encyclopedias in book form these days rolling off the press, they are now either on DVD or subscription website.
Googles Limitations:
Google as in the search engine is only limited by the accuracy of the content it scans, it cannot guarantee the sites it displays to you contains accurate information about the search, only that it does match the search request you put into the system.
Google censorship:
Google is arguably the world's most popular search engine. However, contrary perhaps to a naive impression, in some cases the results of a search are affected by various government-related factors. That is, search results which may otherwise be shown, are deliberately excluded. The suppression may be local to a country, or global to all Google results.
A Google search is not simply a raw dump of a database query to the user's screen. The retrieval of the data is just one step. There is much post-processing afterwards, in terms of presentation and customization.
When Google "removes" material, often it is still in the Google index itself. But the post-processing has removed it from any results shown to the user. This system can be applied, for quality reasons, to remove sites which "spam" the search engine. And that is, by volume, certainly the overwhelming application of the mechanism. But it can also be directed against sites which have been prohibited for government-based reasons for example china’s political policies.
Googles future..
It’s a strong company launching new products and services, the search engine continues to grow in sized and strength and more googleplexes are built around the world. The latest googleplex is the size of four football fields and has cooling towers to remove the heat from its massive banks of servers. Google technologies are working on products like voice over IP, desktop search engines to find items on your own PC, google earth, google mars and many others. But recently their work with distributed computing projects which allow users who have downloaded a plug in for the google toolbar to turn their computer into part of massive super computer and work on university projects when your machine is idol.
# posted by Peter Saville - IT Consultant @ 9:21 PM 
