Google

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Google uses a complicated mathematical analysis, calculated on more than a billion hyperlinks on the web, to return high-quality search results so you don't have to sift through junk. This analysis allows Google to estimate the quality, or importance, of every web page it returns. The importance of a web page is entirely independent of any query. A page like www.google.com has high importance if (1) Other pages with high importance point to www.google.com and (2) Lots of other pages with high importance point to www.google.com. This definition seems circular, and it is. Nonetheless, it yields a well-defined notion of importance that makes finding high quality sites easy. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query, so Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, when considering a page, Google looks at what the pages linking to that page have to say about it. For common queries like company names, the company claims that Google is good at getting the right result first that the developers put in an "I'm feeling lucky" button. The "I'm feeling lucky" button takes you directly to the first search result. I found that this feature didn't work well for me and I caution you about it's use. There is more information to help you search. More about why you should use Google. If you want more details, read Google Frequently Asked Questions. Information about Google Inc. General suggestions and comments may be emailed to Google at [email protected] Google also has a federal govenment search engine called Uncle Sam and another search engine that searches just Linux resources.

(Last updated 10/11/02)