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The Greatness Of Google

I serve a sample platter of Google’s buffet of services. But one central question remains: What makes Google so great in the first place? How did it become so rampantly popular that it started a new era of competition among search engines? Those, of course, are two questions, not one, and my inability to count is one reason Stephen Hawking doesn’t return my phone calls. (In typing that little quip, I wasn’t sure how to spell Hawking’s first name. Naturally, I Googled it.)

Google’s success depends to some extent on the size of I ts index, which has long passed the billion-page mark — Google claims to have the largest Web search index in the world. But the big index is hardly the entire story. More important is a certain intelligence with which the index interprets keywords. Google’s groundbreaking innovation in this department is its capability to not only find pages but also rank them based on their popularity. The legendary Google page rank is determined largely by measuring how many links to that page exist on other sites all over the Web. The logic here is simple and hard to refute: Page A links to page B for one reason only, and that is because page B contains something worthwhile. If pages C, D, E, F, and G also link to page B, odds increase that page B has something important going for it. If five-hundred thousand pages link to page B, it is without question truly important in some way.

This explanation is grossly simplified, and Google isn’t divulging details. But the backlink feature is the advantage that makes Google search results so fantastic. Google can still dish up a clunker from time to time, frequently because of poor keywords entered by the user. And dead pages haven’t been eliminated. But when it comes to finding basic information or Web destinations, Google delivers stunning results with incredible speed and accuracy. Beyond Google’s legendary indexing algorithm lies another aspect to its success. Users like Google not only for the quality of its results but also for the speed and reliability with which they are delivered.

In Google’s early days, as I was getting to know the service, my first and strongest impression was speed! Google receives hundreds of millions of daily search queries. It distributes the ponderous computing strain placed upon its system by using a gigantic global network of computers. How many? Google doesn’t say, but the figure is certainly in the tens of thousands.

Google values numbers more than pricey quality, and its computers are average machines. The software linking them keeps the system robust, and when a computer fails (which happens every day), others pick up the slack. So part of Google’s winning formula lies in raw computing horsepower and resiliency to system failures. Google calmly digests keywords in almost ninety languages. Googling is the one activity that unites the entire Internet citizenry, and Google has forever altered the Internet landscape and the ease with which we move through it.