In Google We Trust 246
firstadopter.com writes "The New York Times (registration needed) writes about how far Google has penetrated our culture (soul sucking "Free" registration required) in the last six years with the pros and cons of its success. It's amazing to think 200 million searches are done on the search engine each day on an index of 6 billion pages."
The multi million dollar question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternative search engines (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Alternative search engines (Score:1, Interesting)
Not impossible... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is not the only Search. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google isn't the only search engine out there, just the dominant one at the moment. Somebody who is using only Google, and is not aware that their are other tools with which to get a second opinion is missing out on a pretty big portion of the web that Google either hasn't discovered or just doesn't think highly of in PageRank.
Devotion to google (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not religiously devoted to Google, I use it because I reckon it's the best search engine available. If something better comes along, I'd switch straight away.
Media Sensationalism (Score:4, Interesting)
This is so untrue. Almost any computer savvy individual knows that google results are not very reliable. Google is just an online popularity contest. And it doesn't go very deep into the website structure. If you believe in google as your messiah, then you do really need to get your head checked.
As for the story about Left Handed Guitars, all I can say is it took google more than one month to include my site in their searches. So unless the guy did the search after one month, he would probably not have found them.
Google is not at all what it is hyped upto be. It has its uses, but it ain't the oracle my friend.
Re:Mike Myers commentary on Goldmember (Score:2, Interesting)
google is a modification of the word googol [reference.com]
but pronounced virtually identically, so really its the other way round and it was already in use (since at least 1938) before google discovered its branding potential
Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking back on things, I don't know how I ever got anything done without firefox or google...
What about the deep web? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, the "deep web" is the best place to make obscure searches, and I've used turbo10.com to perform searches in this way. It's really interesting to compare the results of two searches between google and turbo10 - google certainly appears to be the quick and easy search engine that grandma can use, but for serious work, I am increasingly finding myself turning to the deep web.
We may need more complete site directories (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently many interesting sites, such as wikipedia, everything2, groklaw, are spread by words-of-mouth (mostly on slashdot :) Surely many people has taken the pain to collect a set of links that is hopefully quite complete by the time of writing (which is much harder than simple googling), but such pages usually show up only in obscure places at google. Maybe the community can invent some way to make an easy-to-use distributed link-list service where everyone can easily share the results of their searching efforts.
It's amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Its impessive. (Score:5, Interesting)
The alternative... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I stopped using google. (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.teoma.com/
It usually has what I'm looking for on the first page, not buried ten pages deep.
Same post (Score:3, Interesting)
6 Billion Pages? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternative search engines (Score:5, Interesting)
Some things are fantastic on google/google groups. Searching for technical answers, and often general searching.
Some things work less well for me, often because of the linkfarm pond scum. Searching for say a type of shop in a particular town often isn't as good as Yell [yell.co.uk]. For fact finding, I often use Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. For movie info, I go straight to the IMDB [slashdot.org].
For a search engine, though, I've yet to find anything better.
Privacy (Score:1, Interesting)
Google, the friendly giant... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Google Ate My Brain" (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading somewhere on the Net (of course) a piece called something like "Google Ate My Brain" refering to the fact that you have to google to know something, and you can't rely on your existing knowledge. While it's great to be able to use Google for nearly everything you would like to know about, it has its sad counterpoints. One of the counterpoints could be the fact that you are more unsure if what you know about a thing really is right, and you have to google for the truly definitive answer. And another counterpoint could be the absence of deep knowledge on websites.
Re:The multi million dollar question... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can personally vouch for why a good chunk of my home town (population 120K) uses it.
When Google was in Beta, I told my parents. They saw the usefulness and being teachers immediately started recommending it to students and other teachers for research. Students in turn talked to other kids and their parents.
About a month after that, the local librarian was recommending it, having heard about it from someone at the board office, who heard about it from another teacher that works at my mothers school.
That's as far as I traced the path but I'm fairly confident it went further than that.
Of course, I picked it up on Slashdot.
Re:The multi million dollar question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The multi million dollar question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I think when Google started out, Venture Capatilists helped fund it and they probably want to cash in, and get themselves some booty. That is what they do, invest in something so that they can sell it at a profit later on.
My chief google frustration is... (Score:2, Interesting)
I wish google would stop passing the search words along with the URL when I click on a link. That's a privacy invasion.
What's worse, now I've started to receive spam that's addressed as 'from' people whose names I've looked up.
Other than that, I could worship at the temple of google happily. Except that they're planning to go public. Could someone please send me a list of other good engines? I want a couple backup places to check when google starts to suck.
Re:Alternative search engines (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google-centric web design (Score:3, Interesting)
Indirectly, it does. According to some articles I've read (this month's Maximum PC, for example), PageRank will consider the presentation (bold, italic, font size, etc) of a word when assigning a weight to it. Think of it, sometimes it's a hint of how important a word is, and rating importance is what Google is all about.
A true test of the internet (Score:3, Interesting)
What if google suddently went down? Completely. Totally. Off-the-map down. I wonder how well the internet would route around the problem. Sure there are other search engines, but think of all the more subtle effects that might seen as a result.