an ode to google
Without a doubt, Google is taking over the world. Mainly because it was the first company to understand that search matters. Back in 1999, the Yahoos, Excites and Altavistas of the web were busy positioning themselves as portals, not search companies. CEOs weren’t apologetic about it either – one famously explained “as long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”
In the end, though, the CEO was wrong – users do care about search. Portal companies are drying up and pure search is having a renaissance. Competitors like Teoma are springing up to give Google a run for the money. But the original is already miles ahead. While Google has a reputation for being laser-focused on search, that’s only partly true. Wisely, Google has defined its mission in the broadest sense: helping people find information on the internet more easily. Hence the addition of features that any religious Google user (and the number of self-proclaimed Google zealots grows daily) depends upon: the dictionary links in the blue bar, or the ability to find stock quotes or maps just by searching for tickers or addresses. And with the ability to search within the web’s Word documents, PDF files and newsgroup postings, Google’s reach and power continues to grow.
Beyond all this, Google has been banging out a number of other features – ones that have yet to go mainstream. Check them out now, and glow with the smugness of the early adopter:
News aggregation and a news-specific search.
Google-powered catalog shopping.
Distributed computing project to put web surfers’ unused processor power to work on a cure for cancer. (While this isn’t yet available to the general public, you can sneak into the beta here. )
And, of course, you shouldn’t miss the best piece of Google fiction ever written.