From iA wiki
See also: Search Engine | Searching Resources | How To Search | Quicksearches
Home Page: http://www.google.com
An Internet media corporation mainly known because of its advertising business and search engine that has immense popularity and reliability, noted for its high performance. At Google users can try an advanced search as well as search the Web, search for Images, Usenet discussion forums, Open Directory (which is a categorized volunteer-maintained set of link categories) and the News. Google also has a cache feature which can display pages that have been removed from the net, but still exist in Google's cache.
It is is both fast and free (as in beer). Google supports itself through advertising* and Search Solution Services. Google has country, language, topic-specific and directory search functions. Google has developed proprietary technology which has proven to deal with scalability well. Part of this success comes from the fact that while Google does not search very deeply, it does sort and order an excellent choice of pages which includes PDF, DOC and PostScript files.
Google has become the biggest search engine on the Internet which raises a concern of privacy, ethics and bias. Their Orkut has multiple privacy issues. Gmail, Google's mail server will not guarantee deleted mails are actually deleted.
Google shares began trading on NASDAQ on the 19th august 2004 after selling approximately 10% of the company using a model similar to Dutch auction. Successfull bidders paid $85 for their shares. More shares will enter the market over the next six months as insiders are allowed to sell.
Google Zeitgeist is a popularity indicator of search terms using the statistics from its websites and its several country-wide websites. Since august 2004, Google has taken down a few statistics of its Zeitgeist: web browser usage and operating system usage. These statistics were popular in discussions on the Net as indicator of market share of the various web browsers and OSs.
Google.com
- Google Answers - Non-Free service which has a real person answer a question. While asking a question isn't free, the archive of questions, their answers and various comments are freely available. Nicely categorized.
- Google Language Tools
- Froogle - All the world's products in one page
- Google - Mac, Google - Linux, Google - Microsoft, Google - Universities
- Google Labs - Google's public brainstorming.. projects they are currently working on which aren't ready for mainstream use.
- Google expert search tips
- Google Feedback, including Google FAQs
- Google Calculator help
- Google Desktop search
Google Mail
(aka Gmail)- Google Mail
- Google Gmail Loader -- Import your existing email into Gmail.
- gmail apps -- The author's other apps. Very impressive stuff, like the Gmail Drive which lets you use GMail as an external storage space.
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/google_mail_is_evil_privacy/ -- There appear to be very serious public concerns over Google's privacy policies.
Related Links
- News on Google
- The Google Time Bomb - Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine?
- Googlewhacking - Your goal: find that elusive query (two words - no quote marks) with a single, solitary result!
- Google Blog - Some interesting and odd information about Google
- 10 Ways to Search Google
- Google's Gag Order: An Internet Giant Threatens Free Speech - Evidence of Anti-Liberal Bias at Google?
- Discussion of the google IPO, google's economic prospects and what the share price will be in the future
- Google Hacking Database - Google finds and points to sensitive content.
- Google Watch - Censorship, privacy violations, potential or actual abuses from the emerging Google's monopoly.
- Scroogle - Privacy-enhanced interface to Google and Yahoo, not using cookies (or other data mining), access log deleted after one week and Firefox engine available. The interface works fast, but it lacks a few functions such as the picture-search part of Google, the Google cache, and other goodies. However it doesn't store a permanent cookie on your computer nor does it show anything useful (e.g. search details) in HTTP referer logs. A project by Google-Watch.
