The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Unless you have been locked in your basement without your computer for the last several years, you know all about the expanding influence of Google. This company has revolutionized web searching and online information seeking. Up to three or four years ago, one of the biggest difficulties with using the web came when searching for information. I read somewhere a few years ago "the Internet is the world's greatest library, but it has been organized by a drunk." Not the most politically correct statement, but if you think about using the web four or five years ago, it definitely summed up the experience. Google changed that. Using Google as my main, (and just about only) web searching tool these days, I can most often find what I am looking for in the first page of results displayed, and it is extremely rare that I need to pass through the first two or three pages without finding what I want. Try searching your own name on Google and other people that you know, old friends, etc. You'll probably be surprised at what pops up. Google's search engine is run completely by a set of math algorithms. They have robotically controlled software spiders which crawl through the net constantly, searching for new pages, updates, pictures, documents, etc. These spiders send their results back to Google's massive servers which compile their search results based on page popularity. The more pages linking into a particular page, the higher it appears in Google's rankings. But with this company soon offering stocks for sale, the entire online service is coming under increasing scrutiny. The share's are predicted to balloon from a $2.7 billion (U.S) initial offering, quickly towards a total value of $20 billion! Differently from other companies, Google is also offering its shares for sale first in an online auction and not through major banks. No matter what you are looking for, you can probably find it through Google. They offer a search engine for webpages (obviously), but also specific tools which will just look for images, a separate section for news which compiles stories from literally hundreds of papers, a section of groups where you can find opinions of almost any topic imaginable, and Froogle, a new service allowing web surfers to search for specific products available online. All of this praise aside, Google has been in the news lately for a few gaffes on their part; the latest being Gmail, Google's answer to Hotmail. Free email accounts similar to Yahoo or Hotmail are coming from Google, with massive web storage space of up to 1 GB being possible. The problem is that a robotic spider is going to crawl through every email you receive at this free account, trolling the text of every message for keywords and directing advertising to you based on what it finds. A serious invasion of privacy. As well, Google has been in trouble for not spending any time refining its search algorithms, or allowing human engineers to have some input into the final ranking results of websites. For example, searching for the word "Jew" brings you to a site called Stormfront which is a site constructed by a white pride group advocating hate against this religious group. Searching for the term "Google's IPO" (stock offering) will actually bring you to a site created by a group of people attempting to blackmail Google for $7.5 billion U.S. dollars. With over 80 per cent of North American Internet searches being directed either at Google itself, or one of the other search engines it feeds results to (Yahoo, Netscape, AOL, and Earthlink), the power of this company will not diminish anytime soon, and it is worth keeping an eye on it to see the direction it is heading, as it will effect the web as a whole. ([email protected])
