Google search engine

 

 

 

 

Google Search Engine is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.

Google not only indexes and caches web pages but also takes “snapshots” of other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, and so on. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to (X)HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file.

Users can customize the search engine, by setting a default language, using the "SafeSearch" filtering technology and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms and retain the data for more than a year. For any query, up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.

These are the predominant type of search tools you’ll run across. Originally, the term search enginereferred to some kind of search index, a huge database containing information from individual Web sites. Google’s vast index (www.google.com) contains over 3 billion pages, for instance. Large search-index companies own thousands of computers that use software known as spiders or robots (or just plainbots — Google’s software is known as Googlebot) to grab Web pages and read the information stored in them. These systems don’t always grab all the information on each page or all the pages in a Web
site, but they grab a significant amount of information and use complex algorithms to index that information. Google, shown in Figure 1-1, is the world’s most popular search engine.