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Preface
Search engines for large collections of data preceded the World Wide
Web by decades. There were those massive library catalogs, hand-typed
with painstaking precision on index cards and eventually, to varying
degrees, automated. There were the large data collections of
professional information companies such as Dialog and LexisNexis.
Then there are the extant private, expensive medical, real estate,
and legal search services.Those data collections were not always easy to search, but with a
little finesse and a lot of patience, it was always possible to
search them thoroughly. Information was grouped according to
established ontologies, the data preformatted according to particular
guidelines.Then came the Web.Information on the Webas anyone who has ever looked at half a
dozen web pages knowsis not all formatted the same way. Nor is
it necessarily accurate. Nor up to date. Nor spellchecked.
Nonetheless, search engines cropped up, trying to make sense of the
rapidly increasing index of information online. Eventually, special
syntaxes were added for searching common parts of the average web
page (such as title or URL). Search engines evolved rapidly, trying
to encompass all the nuances of the billions of documents online, and
they continue to evolve today.Google© threw its hat into the ring in 1998. The
second incarnation of a search engine service known as BackRub, the
name Google was a play on the word
googol : a one followed by a hundred zeros. From
the beginning, Google was different from the other major search
engines onlineAltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and others.Was it the technology? Partially. The relevance of
Google's search results was outstanding. But more
than that, Google's focus and more human face made
it stand out online.With its friendly presentation and constantly expanding set of
options, it's no surprise that Google continues to
draw lots of fans. There are weblogs devoted to it. Search engine
newsletters, such as ResearchBuzz, spend a lot of time covering
Google. Legions of devoted fans spend a lot of time uncovering
undocumented features, creating games (such as Google
whacking ), and even coining new words (such as
Googling , the practice of checking out a
prospective date or hire via Google's search
engine.) People Google prospective employers and blind dates; goods
and services; school reports and movie reviews; facts and fiction;
fun and profit.At the time of this writing, Google knows about more than eight
billion web pages, over 880 million images, and 845 million Usenet
messages and has just announced Google Print (http://print.google.com), bringing even the
printed word to the Web.In April 2002, Google reached out to its fan base by offering the
Google API. The Google API gives programmers a way to access the
Google search results with automated queries. While you can do all
the searching, sifting, and sorting by hand, there's
nothing like getting your computer to do it for you.Google has changed the way people and computers alike approach the
Web.
