The World According To Google
At the fast-growing Silicon Valley company, executives say their goal is simply to keep serving the searching public with carefully vetted information. In a letter attached to last week's stock filing, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, vowed that new financial pressures won't make the company any less dedicated to that goal. After all, Google execs note, any user can consign Google to oblivion with little more than a mouse click. "The costs of switching search engines are ridiculously low," says Craig Silverstein, Google's technology director. So the company periodically tweaks its ranking criteria to better identify what's relevant and weed out sites that try to trick Google and boost their standing. It also safeguards its core rankings from the questionable ethics that afflicted early search engines--the sale of top rankings, for example. "We know there are lines that we cannot cross without p - - - ing off a lot of people," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The key to Google's success, though, is the radically different approach to making sense of the Web mapped out in the late 1990s by Brin and Page while they were graduate students at Stanford University. Earlier search engines like AltaVista and Lycos scanned Web pages for words matching a user's search terms, then ranked sites largely based on how often those terms appeared. Brin and Page's breakthrough formula, dubbed "PageRank" partly after its codesigner, instead toted up the number of other pages linking to a particular page, counting each one as an endorsement of the site's content.
They named their company after "googol," a math term for an impossibly high number--the seeming breadth of the burgeoning Web. Google's consciously unsplashy look added to its splash. Its simple search box was refreshing at a time of clutter in other engines, which often became "portals" that buried query boxes under news, weather, and stock quotes--and flashing, gyrating, pulsating banner ads. Combined with Google's uncanny ability to deliver relevant results fast, the clean look made searching the Web seem simple. "It gives you a false sense that you are close to the entire Internet, that it's all just a click away," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches communication studies at New York University.
Behind that illusion are powerful minds and computers, constantly refining the secret algorithms that determine what pops up on a search. "Fundamentally, we depend on our intellectual horsepower to stay ahead," says Silverstein. Indeed, the company is said to have more Ph.D.'s per square foot than any other U.S. firm--though gravitas isn't what first strikes a visitor. Rather, the self-conscious playfulness of the dot-com culture is visible throughout the corridors and common rooms of its Silicon Valley headquarters. Brightly colored exercise balls and a pool table beckon employees needing a break from brain overload. Lava lamps decorate nooks and crannies like so many company pendants. For errands, motorized scooters and Segways, the high-wheeled transporters, stand at the ready.
Spiders' stratagem. Hidden from view is the company's secret weapon--thousands of high-performance computers. The company won't say just how many, but outside estimates put the figure at more than 100,000, in perhaps a dozen centers worldwide. That could make Google the world's largest operator of a distributed computer network. The PCs send software "spiders" out to crawl the Web and retrieve page copies to store on several hundred thousand Google hard drives--a library that now includes 4.3 billion pages. It's those stored copies that a user actually searches, rather than the Web itself, which helps explain Google's fast results. Searches that typically took three or four seconds with predecessors are finished in split seconds, a fact Google proudly displays with the results.
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