Larry Page and Sergey Brin, doctorial candidates at Stanford University's school
of computer science, are the creators of what is now known all over the world as
Google. Their academic backgrounds gave them the basis for Google. In academic
publishing, citing previously published works gives rank and authority. Annotation refers to
description and evaluation of a citation. Rank is given to those publications
which contain citations, which are cited often themselves, add to the importance
of each citation. Based on the ideas of citation and annotation, Larry Page
called his project BackRub, and it consisted of a way to discover links
on the web, store them, and expose who was linking to any site on the Web. The
theory is the more citations, the more important the work.
But
the next important step was to figure out a way to rank who was linking to a
site. Page and Sergey Brin, a math prodigy, developed a ranking system with
higher ranking for authoritative sites and lower ranking for unimportant ones.
They created an algorithm which they called PageRank after Larry Page
that could take into account the number of links into a site and the number of
links into each of the linking sites. PageRank brought up relevant results where
the ordering of follow-up pages was also good.
They realized that since PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web got, the better
the search engine would be.
So as a result they named their invention Google, after googol, the term for
the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.1
The first version of Google was released on the Stanford web site in August
1996.
Since August 1996,Google has expanded tremendously and provides a wide range of services. To find
out more about the services Google offers, click on these links:
About Google:
http://www.google.com/support/?hl=en
This page lists all available Google services.
Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com/schhp?tab=ws
"Google Scholar provides a simple way to
broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across
many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and
articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint
repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar
helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly
research."
Google Book Search:
http://books.google.com/bkshp?tab=wp
"Finding books with Google
Book Search is as easy as finding websites with Google Web Search;
just enter the keyword or phrase you're looking for into the Google
Book Search box. For example, when you search for "rock climbing" or
for a phrase like "one
small step for man," we'll find all the books whose contents
match your search terms. Click on a book title and you'll see basic
info about the book just like you'd see in a card catalog. You might
also see a few snippets - sentences of your search term in context.
If a publisher or author has given us permission, you'll see a full
page and be able to browse within the book to see more pages. If the
book is out of copyright, you'll see a full page and you can page
forward or back to see the full book. Clicking on "Search within
this book," allows you to perform more searches within the book
you've selected. You can click on any of the "Buy this Book" links
to go straight to an online bookstore where you can buy the book. In
many cases, you can also click "Find this book in a library" to find
a local library where you can borrow it."
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Google Image Search:
http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi
"Google's Image Search is the
most comprehensive on the Web, with billions of images indexed and
available for viewing. To use Image Search, select the "images" tab
or visit
http://images.google.com.
Enter a query in the image search box, then click on the "Search"
button. On the results page, just click the thumbnail to see a
larger version of the image, as well as the web page on which the
image is located.
The images
identified by the Google Image Search service may be protected by
copyrights. Although you can locate and access the images through
our service, we cannot grant you any rights to use them for any
purpose other than viewing them on the web. Accordingly, if you
would like to use any images you have found through our service, we
advise you to contact the site owner to obtain the requisite
permissions.
WARNING:
The results you see with this feature may contain mature content.
Google considers a number of factors when determining whether an
image is relevant to your search request. Because these methods are
not entirely foolproof, it's possible some inappropriate pictures
may be included among the images you see. (The mature content filter
is only available from an English interface.)"
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What does copyright mean?
Very briefly,
the right of an author, artist, publisher (creator of
the work) to retain ownership of works and to produce or contract others to
produce copies. Copyright is an important consideration in Google Book Search
and Google Image Search.
Web Search Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/?ctx=web
_________________________________________________________________________________________
1 Battelle, John,
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
Transformed Our Culture.
( New York: Portfolio, 2005) 69-77.
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Date Last Updated:04/23/08
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