The Greatness of Google

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In this chapter, 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 nearly eradicated other general 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 its index, which has long passed the billion-page mark — Google claims to have the largest Web search index in the world.

Technical Stuff 

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 PageRank 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 500,000 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 back links feature is the advantage that makes Google search results so fantastic. It’s nearly miraculous for people who have been searching the Web for years. To a large extent, the days of laborious, frustrating searching are gone. Google can still dish up a clunker from time to time, frequently because of poor keywords. 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.

And Google is busy! Every day Google answers more than 200 million search queries. Google calmly digests keywords in almost 90 languages. At this writing, only a third of Google’s search requests come from the United States. 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.

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