Google Search
Desktop Software
Media
Description
The Google search engine got its start in 1998 in the dorm rooms at Stanford University. The co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set out to index the World Wide Web. Page and Brin created a web-b...ased search engine, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The site's popularity grew, and now the company's name is synonymous with searching the web. Now the company's Googlebot combs the web and indexes millions of sites so that users can find them.
I use Google search all day every day for both work and personal use. I love that all I have to do is enter a term or phrase, and I can generally find what I need within seconds. I find it immensely useful to use the built-in filter functions to look at only images or videos. Articles and sites are arranged by keyword relevance and date, allowing me to scan the latest information and then work back from there if I need something older. Google search, with its modern and uncluttered user interface, is extremely easy to use. I clearly remember being amazed when my 84-year-old great-aunt fired up her Macbook to look up movie showtimes and recipes on Google. When you perform as many searches as I do in a day, it's great that it fixes my typos and still delivers quality results. Google allows you to use operators that filter results directly from your query. I use this frequently so that I get more productive results. For example, if I am looking for a company but do not want to see their social media pages I can add [-site:facebook.com] or [-site:twitter.com] behind my search query and the named sites will not appear among the results.
My biggest negative about Google search is that because it is so popular and so widely used the company wields a great deal of power over directing internet traffic, and therefore commerce. Some sites complain that the ranking that they receive on result pages is unfair and it feels impossible to change their standing. Newer, smaller sites have a difficult time building enough of a web presence to move up the ranks on result pages among behemoths like Amazon. Reading the company's mission statements and policies gives a positive impression about how rankings work and how a site can improve their standings on result pages, but who makes sure that those policies are followed? Read moreless
Platforms
Windows
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