Google: Boldy Going Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before

Sir Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Arguably, Google is one of the giants that helped searchers uncover the depths of the Web like never before. Despite its humble beginnings as a research project in a dorm room, Google became one of the most popular names on the Internet, performing 1,000 searches every second. Its three-man staff, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has grown to over 2,290 employees, fondly called "Googlers." The Googlers, some of whom are former rocket scientists and neurosurgeons, work hard each day to maintain and improve the search engine.

At first glance, Google.com, with its simple, "less is more" design, doesn't appear to be the homepage of an award-winning multi-billion dollar corporation. However, the technology powering the search giant is more complicated than most of its users could ever fathom. It takes a lot to index eight billion web pages, especially when each of those individual pages averages about 10KB. According to Google, if you were to print all of the web pages in its index, you'd have a stack of papers over 454 miles high!

The technology behind Google is far from perfect. That's right. Even the largest, most successful companies can have hardware malfunctions, and Google is no exception. The company actually expects daily failure in at least one of its 30 clusters, each of which contain up to 2,000 PC's. Amazingly enough, Google hasn't had a complete system failure in nearly five years.

Another challenge is the nature of the Web. Sure, some sites are written in nice, clean code and are full of content and text. But what about the more complex designs? What about completely graphical sites with little or no text?

Google has indicated it's working on this problem. It helps that Google's approach has always been to view the Internet not by the content and text created on the page but by the links pointing to that content. Boldy going where no search engine had gone before, Google let the webmasters themselves determine the value of each site's content by using link popularity as a main factor in its PageRank algorithm.

Some cyber junkies have been swearing by Google's search results since 1999, when it officially moved out of Beta version. Even the critics have to agree: Google didn't make it to the top for nothing. The company's understanding of the end users' needs combined with a drive to improve search results got Google where it is today. But how does the company plan to keep its top spot with Microsoft and Yahoo! looking to steal the throne? According to one Google engineer: by improving usability, comprehensiveness, freshness of search results, and through personalization and understanding of the end users' needs and intentions. No one knows how Google will implement these changes but one thing's for sure: it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the end.