Google and the web

Lately I’ve been reading the book The Google Story by David Vise. Meanwhile, I came across several news stories about the company, and they show how out-of-date the book, which was published in 2005, has already become.

The book is an entertaining and fast-paced read that traces the company from it’s humble roots in 1998, when two young computer science grad students took the fall semester off to work on improving their search engine, google.stanford.edu, driven by a complex algorithm that ranked websites based on dozens of factors. They rented a house for $1,700 a month and wired together servers from used computers in their garage, hired their first employee, and finally got around to incorporating Google only because they needed to cash a $100,000 check that they had received from an angel investor.

Now people worry that with 63 percent of all web searches, and over 70 of the US market share in search, they are too dominant. Others worry about threats to privacy when Google now possesses so much data on searches, email, and other web apps, and can use that data to customize advertisements to closely match whatever subjects users are searching or emailing about.

According to the book, in 2000, when Google was celebrating the signing of a major deal with Yahoo to provide Yahoo’s site with Google-generated search results, they also announced that they had surpassed one billion web pages in their index of websites to become the largest search engine in the world.

“Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 million miles high in less than half a second. We think that’s pretty cool,” co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time.

But by 2008, according to a recent New York Times article, their website archive had already surpassed the next large rounded number. “One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.”

So it’s time to modify Brin’s statement, “Now you can search the equivalent of a stack of paper more than 70 billion miles high in less than half a second.”

The rapidly expanding number websites, the growth in the non-English parts of the internet, the creation of digital libraries, and the large pools of data discussed in the above article found in databases that are now accessible on the internet show that there is a lot more to come. It’s hard to imagine what we’ll be able to do on the internet ten years from now. And the rapid growth and new functions of the internet provide a lot of new opportunities for Google and other web companies.

“The great thing about search is that we are not going to solve it anytime soon. There are so many problems and failings,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2000. “I see no end to what we need to do.”