Seek and thy shall find

The Web is easily the most efficient and comprehensive resource of information that you can lay your hands on, whether you are an amateur astronomer searching for information on Black Holes or a homemaker looking for a new recipe for tomato ketchup. It is fast, mostly accurate and won’t burn a hole in your pocket with expensive journal and library subscriptions. Come to think of it, it is very much like the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy (or in our case, an Earthman's Guide to Planet Earth and Surroundings.!)

However, finding that information in the billions of pages that make up the Web is a totally different story. Try entering a keyword into any popular search engine and you will be bombarded with millions after millions of results. (Talk about finding the proverbial needle in the digital haystack – the classic case of information overload.) There was a time when you had to memorize arcane commands and be the master of Boolean logic, juggling the “AND”s and the “NOT”s to finally get to the page that makes you say - “Eureka!”

Google changed it all. The brainchild of two Stanford graduates (Sergey Brin and Larry Page), this search engine brought some common sense into search technology. It said – Hey, if you are looking for a web page, then how popular (and useful) it is should be determined by how many sites link to it. Right? I guess so. After all, that is what the Web is all about. You put up something, and link to other related pages for more. And the votes of more popular sites weigh heavier than the average one-hit-in-a-month site. Makes even more sense. All of this, and the usual rating parameters (with a Google touch, of course!) combined to give birth to the best search engine on the planet.

In a very short span of time, Google has become familiar to almost everyone using the Internet, for one reason or the other. It found favour with all; from novices, coming for their first Web experience to the hardened Web researcher alike. It also earned that rare distinction of a product name actually being used for a verb; ‘Googling’ entered the common parlance soon after. Google was even named the most valuable brand in the world for the previous year.

And all of this done by web robots (or ‘spiders’) that scour the Web, meticulously visiting and recording everything that comes in front of its digital eyes, storing them away for later use. Software that ties together small PC clusters running Linux, producing enough computing might to rival many of today’s expensive supercomputers. Data mining options available to anyone interested and motivated enough to use this mammoth data library. And all this power, hidden beneath a large white screen with an unassuming logo, a text-box and couple of buttons. If this is not software magic, I don’t know what is.

It is a pity that with access to the world’s largest integrated information source at your fingertips, the most anyone can think of looking up is Britney Spears!