Monday, December 30, 2002		Feature

Googlevolution is here
John Naughton

IT'S one of the wonders of the age. You type a few words into a text box on a screen and it ransacks the biggest index in the history of the world and comes back - usually within a second or two - with the text and source of a quotation, or a Web page giving advice on troubleshooting that malfunctioning video recorder, or an article which appeared in the Boston Globe three years ago, or a million other things about which humans are curious.

It’s the fourth most popular site on the World Wide Web, and two of the top three sites use its technology to provide their own search facilities. Its page-ranging system is so good that millions of Internet users rely on it to find Web addresses rather than copying them from letterheads.

It’s changing the way we think about information, and may one day change how we think about knowledge itself. It’s an Internet start-up, which makes serious money and yet remains a private company. And it’s only four years old. Welcome to Google.

Google is the brainchild of two Stanford PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in the late 1990s. As the Web exploded, they focused on an increasingly urgent problem: with the contents of the Web increasing at the rate of 35,000 pages an hour, how was humanity to save itself from drowning in the data and information it was spewing out? In the face of such a deluge, how would anybody find anything? This is the problem that search engines were invented to solve. They function by relentlessly crawling the Web, indexing the pages and storing the indexes in huge databases held on ‘server farms’ - warehouses full of computers and air-conditioning equipment.

The problem is that search engines are dumb creatures - they have no idea about the content of the pages they index, and can therefore make no distinction between, say, Casablanca the movie and Casablanca the city. As the Web expanded, the deficiencies of dumb indexing became apparent. Queries to early search engines such as AltaVista would turn up apparently impressive results - 40,000 pages in response to ‘Casablanca’, say - but because they were unable to discriminate between pages relevant to the inquiry and the deranged ramblings of a Bogart fan, the inquirer was often left having to wade through a mountain of irrelevant links in the hope of finding the page which prompted the search in the first place.

Faced with this problem, Page and Brin had a great idea. There wasn’t much they could do about the dumb indexing, they reasoned, but they could make the page ranking process more intelligent by giving a higher placing to Web pages with large numbers of links from other Web pages. Think of it as a kind of automated peer-review. Or harnessing the collective intelligence of the Internet community. Page and Brin then wrote a set of algorithms (mathematical procedures embedded in computer code) to implement this idea, got it up and running on Stanford computers, concluded that it worked and set about getting some funding. One of the first persons they talked to was Andy Bechtolscheim - a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. After 10 minutes Andy wrote a personal cheque for $ 1,00,000. Google was born.

Google launched as a Beta (geek-speak for ‘rough but complete version’) about four years ago, and had much the same effect as Netscape and Napster. That is to say, there was a moment when nobody knew what the word meant, and then everyone seemed to be using the service. Its rise has been inexorable. It is now the search engine used by the vast majority of Web users - either directly (via google.com) or indirectly (via AOL and Yahoo! rebadging of Google technology).

New York singles use it to check out potential dates before committing to a meeting. Academics use it to check for plagiarism in essays. Plumbers use it to consult maintenance manuals on shower heads. Narcissists use it to check out what information about them is available on the Web (ego-surfing). Consumers use it to find out about pricing and availability of goods and services. Parents use it to find out what their children are talking about. And it has become the indispensable research tool for every middle-class schoolkid in the world.

It has even spawned a verb - ‘to Google’, as in the New Yorker cartoon showing two chaps in a bar. ‘I can’t explain it’, says one, ‘it’s just a funny feeling I’m being Googled.’

To date, Google the company hasn’t put a foot wrong. It has increased its coverage of the Web and now claims to index more than three billion pages. It continues to make money without resorting to the desperate techniques of other portals (pop-up ads, junk email, paid-for rankings and sites that increasingly resemble fairground billboards). Google, in contrast, remains sparse, economical, efficient. And it has steadily expanded its services - first by buying up the entire archive of Internet discussion groups, then by providing a database of images. Next came an extraordinary ‘Google News’ service - which ceaselessly monitors more than 4,000 online news sources and prepares an automated digest which is constantly refreshed, providing a neutral overview of what the world’s media are saying at any given moment. And now it has launched ‘Froogle’ - a site enabling consumers to find products and compare prices. — GNS