Google - what's that?: Only the world's favourite internet search engine, a phenomenally efficient tool for finding things on the net that millions of internet users tap their way to daily, across their keyboards.
Google is so popular that it has become the standard verb for searching the internet, as in, "I googled Google to see what articles have been written about the company's IPO."
Set up by some painfully bright young things in California, right? Two Stanford University, California computer science students founded the company - Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were in their early 20s when they met in the 1990s and began thinking about a graduate project involving internet search technologies. They needed cash to keep working on the ideas, though - and no one was interested. Finally, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems wrote them a personal cheque for $100,000. The company launched on September 7th, 1998. It is now housed in a building called the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
Why is Google.com so popular?: There have been other search engines Yes, but Google users quickly found it could return more relevant webpages faster than any other engine.
Relevancy is big at Google. A million webpages might contain the word "election", for example, but Google is good at finding the sites that are most likely to have trustworthy and meaningful information. Google doesn't like to divulge much information on how, but in general it works by analysing how many other websites link to a given website or mention or cite it. The assumption is that the more a site is used or mentioned by others, the more important it must be.
Simplicity of design is also a big factor in Google's popularity - in the cluttered world of search engine pages, it proved easy to use because there aren't a lot of distractions - just a box in which you type your keywords for your search. Anyone can use it.
And users love Google's speed. Blink your eyes and your results are there. All those factors made Google's star rise spectacularly fast.
Why does it have that silly-sounding name?: It's a play on the mathematical term 'googol, which means a one followed by 100 zeros.
The Google website states: " Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organise the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web."
What happens if I google Google? You get 58,900,000 results. The first result, unsurprisingly, is Google.com. This week, Google the company is also topping the stories listed on the Google News section of Google.com, which updates continuously with news stories from around the world.
Google - what's that?: Only the world's favourite internet search engine, a phenomenally efficient tool for finding things on the net that millions of internet users tap their way to daily, across their keyboards.Well, it has taken the basic notion of searching and built an empire around it. Google has developed technologies that will search only for images on the web, or aggregate and then make searchable thousands of daily news stories online.
Google bought up all the old Usenet discussion board archives, so you can literally search the internet's past. And it now has Gmail, a webmail service. Plus, it allows advertisers and their links to be listed on the right of the page when certain keyword searches are typed in.
That's a lot of Googling. And makes them a lot of money. That's why there's so much interest in its IPO - Google is seen as one of the internet's bona fide powerhouse companies. But it will have to see off many future challengers, including Microsoft, which is known to be working on search technologies.
