April 24, 2003
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Google has become such an integral part of the Web that its name has become a verb meaning to search. If you Google Google, for example, the search engine takes 0.08 seconds to turn up 19,300,000 results, beginning with www.Google.com.
By Stuart Glascock
In addition to power, Google's also got buzz. If you search for Google on Google news, in 0.09 seconds you get 1,170 results from a variety of online news sources. One widely circulated article holds up Google as a "shining example of dot-com survival."
Indeed, unlike the legions of failed dot-coms, Google boasts a proven product, a real business plan, and massive computing power--10,000 servers scanning 3B Web pages. Google handles about 200M search queries a day, about half from outside the U.S. It can fetch search results in some 90 languages.
Google does have challengers. Yahoo!, AskJeeves, Ask.com, Overture, AltaVista, and more all covet Google users. Success has even put Google in Microsoft's crosshairs.
To stay ahead of the pack, Google seems to be focusing on users' desire for real-time content. In addition to ongoing partnerships with content providers, Google recently bought Pyra and its Blogger Web logs tool. If Google can add these new functions without compromising its admirable speed, power, and simplicity, it should stay atop the search-engine rankings for a while.
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