History of Computers - Google
--Wirvine 15:13, 7 October 2008 (CDT)By William Irvine
Contents
Introduction
Google is one of, if not the, the most visited websites on the internet. Google is a rapidly growing search engine, so widely used in fact, that the word google has become almost synonymous with the word search. Some people have been known to call a computer simply, “The Google machine.” Though Google is most popular for its search engine, it offers many other features such as image searching, maps, Google Earth, and Gmail. For a full list click here.
Overview
Google began as a school research project by Larry Page in 1996. He was attempting to investigate the mathematical properties of the Internet, and was joined in the project by Sergey Brin, a close friend. The two developed a web crawler that set out from their Stanford page and recorded the number of backlinks, or the number of times a website linked to a given page, a website had. The two then developed the PageRank algorithm that would determine a page's importance by the number of backlinks. They decided that creating a web search tool that ranked pages by importance, based on the algorithm, as opposed to the number of times the search term appeared on the page would generate better results. Thus began google, which started as google.stanford.edu, but quickly became its own domain. In 1997, the company was incorporated in a garage, and thus Google Inc. was born. Google quickly became a massive hit, and by 1998 it had indexed over 60 million pages.
Significance
Google has quickly become one of the most powerful players on the internet, and has revolutionized the way people search the internet. Originally, searching on the internet for various documents, previously done by dredging through the millions of files one by one, was done by using the service called Archie. In 2006, the Merriam Webster and Oxford dictionary added the verb Google, meaning to “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.” From there the term has expanded to mean “to search anything on the internet”. In addition to providing an answer to all search engine needs, Google has brought in so much revenue that the company now plans to release a Google Chrome OS, which is expected to revolutionize the way computers work.
