What makes Google good?

Search engine sticks to simple design and singular purpose

11/22/2001

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

Google is the little search engine that could.

Since its launch in September 1998, this brainchild of two Stanford University doctorate students has chugged past well-funded giants in the field and into the hearts of Internet information seekers worldwide.

Google.com has grown from 5.7 million visitors in September 2000 to 18 million visitors last month, says research firm Jupiter Media Metrix. It powers the searches of such giants as Yahoo, Palm and Netscape, owned by America Online.

"I think the public has seized upon Google because it gets such good relevant results," says Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.

Google's technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards and Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo Internet Life.

So what makes Google good?

BRAINPOWER

Google Inc. is a private company throbbing with gray matter. In 1995, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two dropouts from Stanford's doctoral program in computer science, correctly anticipated that searching the ever-expanding Web was a growth industry.

They zeroed in on technologies that would help users sift through the growing mountain of Web information. It's one thing to search the Internet. It's quite another to find relevance to what you want.

The Google solution was simple on paper: Web pages that are most heavily linked by other websites are usually the most direct routes to the desired nuggets of knowledge. A search engine that could rank results based on heavy linkage would consistently outperform any others, they reasoned. They called the concept "PageRank."

Within three years, the Google team had come up with the first public versions of PageRank. Running on cheap, lean Linux computers, it combined the standard search engine "spider" technology, which combs public Web pages for key words, with the company's own database of heavily linked pages.

The basic design hasn't changed, and its flexibility has allowed incredible growth. The network of 6,000 Google machines has now indexed more than 1.6 billion Web pages, far more than any competitor.

And the company itself has continued to bring more brainpower to its ranks. Today, more than half of the 250-member Google staff are engineers. Fifty employees hold doctorate degrees.

DOES ONE THING WELL

Google's obsession has always been searches.

"Other companies at that time were all thinking about becoming portals," says Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google's founders. "Some of those companies indicated to us that, essentially, they thought search was a solved problem.

"We didn't think that at all."

Says Mr. Sullivan: "Google contrasts directly with portals where search has become a sort of forgotten feature."

NO INTRUSIVE ADS

Moguls of privately held Google say advertising accounts for only about 50 percent of revenue; the other half comes from partners that use Google technology. While other search engines are pushing intrusive ads at users, Google limits ads to text messages tailored to the nature of user inquiries.

INNOVATION

The new tabbed interface on Google.com is a visible byproduct of a well-staffed research team that is constantly testing search concepts. New features are constantly emerging. Google has recently begun indexing links to PDF and Word files scattered across the Net.

And it has taken over indexing of Usenet groups, an Internet space where experts and amateurs trade text messages daily on every subject imaginable. Since Google Groups started up in February, millions of Internet surfers have learned that the Usenet index holds answers to questions too obscure for good results with regular searches.

Says Mr. Sullivan: "Google not only has revised news group searches, but they've increased awareness of what a valuable resource it is for advice and opinions of others."

THE GOOGLE TOOL BAR

Of all the features that software makers have built for the Internet Explorer tool bar, Google's simple search window stands out as the most useful, many consumers say. In the year it has been available at toolbar.google.com, more than 3 million search freaks have installed this little gem to provide instant access to Google from their browsers.

"Here's something that's a simple thing done well, again," Mr. Sullivan says. "There's nothing to install. It's one of the few things that has stayed in my own tool bar and is actually worth using."

HUMOR AND STYLE

The simple elegance of Google's rainbow name on a white background is a welcomed respite from the info-loaded mishmash of other search engines. Users regularly comment on how friendly the layout seems.

Touches of whimsy abound.

The name Google itself is a casual play on the mathematical term, googol – a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Indexing a googol of Web pages is the company's stated objective. Hence the name Google.

Under the search window is a strange button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky." Punching it will take you to the top PageRank result for any query.

On holidays, Google designers greet visitors with special surprises ( www.google.com/holidaylogos.html). A ghost peers through the O's on the Google logo during Halloween. For Mother's Day each year, Google webmasters produce a page honoring employees' moms, complete with thumbnail pictures.

Hidden inside some Google products, users find strange little sayings. The About menu for the Google tool bar, for example, contains only the Latin phrase De parvis grandis a cervus erit – "Small things will make a large pile."

LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Google now serves up more than 70 million searches per day, and they're not all in English. Its allows searches in 26 languages and provides the search technology of 100 companies in 30 countries.