Google Search (or Google Web Search) is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services.
The order of search results on Google's search-results pages is based, in part, on a priority rank called a "PageRank". Google Search provides many options for customized search, using Boolean operators such as: exclusion ("-xx"), alternatives ("xx OR yy"), and wildcards ("x * x").[6] The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers (in formats such as HTML, PDF, etc.), as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google Search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. Google Search provides at least 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for dates, including ranges (70..73), prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions ("10.5 cm in inches"), calculations ("3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2"), package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages. In June 2011, Google introduced "Google Voice Search" and "Search by Image" features for allowing the users to search words by speaking and by giving images. In May 2012, Google introduced a new Knowledge Graph semantic search feature to customers in the U.S. The frequency of use of many search terms has reached such a volume that they may indicate broader economic, social and health trends. Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google (available through Google Adwords, Google Trends, and Google Insights for Search) have been shown to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels and provide the information faster than traditional reporting methods and government surveys. Major competitors of Google are Baidu and Soso.com in China and South Korea; Naver.com, in South Korea; Yandex in Russia; Seznam.cz in Czech Republic; Yahoo in Japan and Taiwan. Another potential competitor is Bing by Microsoft.
History[]
Larry Page (23) and Sergey Brin (22) both went to college at Stanford. In 1996 they started a web search engine called BackRub. In 1997, they renamed it "Google", which was a play on googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeros). This was meant to show their goal, which was index that much information. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check of $100,000 to Google Inc. (which didn't exist). Larry and Sergey of course incorporated Google. Later that year, Google made the best search engine of 1998, because of displaying such relevant results.