It was when I was a junior in high school that I first knew the company called Google through reading an English passage “Searching Google by Google” in a Crazy English magazine. At that time, I was a complete stranger to the whole Internet world, but still somewhat fascinated by the legend created by Google.
Not since Microsoft, really, has the technology world seen anything quite like this. The founders of Google are almost famous, practically icons. Thirty-six –year-old Larry Page and thirty-two-year-old Sergery Brin created Google in graduate school. In 2000, they made their first big splash at the Internet industry’s Webby Awards. The power of Sergery and Larry was that they could take a complex idea and make it simple.
Now, let’s take a look at how a search engine searches. There are three parts to the search engine. The first part is what we call “crawling” and that’s actually where it goes out and fetches pages. And it’s much like we would surf the web, click from link to link, from page to page---except that it has thousands of computers doing this and they all do it as quickly as they possibly can. Then once it has all these pages, of which there are billions, what it does is to index them. And then, the final step is searching which is what somebody like one of those hundreds of millions users comes to the search engine with a query and the search engine accesses the index and tries to figure out what are best pages to answer that query.
The search engine actually uses kind of PC’s which are not unlike the one that we might have at our homes, only it has tens of thousands of them, and they are spread around the world in different data centers.
Google comes from the English word “googol” which was created by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, meaning a figure with a hundred zeros following the number one. It stands for the ambition with which Google strives to conquer the innumerable on line resources, and embodies boundless imagination of the personnel of Google.
