Oogling over Google
Bornak, Tyler M., CIS270WX-01
Help Received: www.citationmachine.net for help with citing, check references
1. Introduction
There once was a time where libraries were commonplace upon academic students. There once was a time that one had to read books and use encyclopedias to find the answers they seek. If someone could not find the answers there, they would ask others. If they did not know, then the answer was unknown. Such was the way of the world until the Internet was born. A “network of networks”, the Internet connects everyone in the world with a computer. However, it was so vast that it was hard to find exactly what you were looking for. It wasn’t until Google was created that vast amounts of information became widely available and easy to find – forever changing America and then the world.
2. History of the Technology
Google wasn’t always the powerhouse IPO (Initial Public Offering) we know it as today. Two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started Google in 1995. They then began the idea of looking at the link structure of the World Wide Web. They discovered that it isn’t trivial to discover links back when surfing from one page to another. They wanted to know who was linking to whom. The reason for this can be explained in terms of academia. Take writing a research paper for example- the paper comes to a conclusion and cites other authors and works to futher support their argument. Page wanted to make the World Wide Web exactly that i.e. you can see who cites whom and therefore more easily find what you are looking for. So, they then created a search engine called BackRub. BackRub gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance when you typed in a URL. Shortly after, Brin and Page changed BackRub to PageRank and made it so that you could search by words. This would search only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relavance. Already being vastly superior to other search engines at the time such as AltaVista and Excite, it became a hit. They then renamed the engine Google, after the mathematical term “googol”. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford website in August 1996. Two years later, a Silicon Valley investor Andy Bechtolsheim incested $100,000 into their project and efforts and thus Google Inc. was created.
3 How Google Works
Google navigates the web by crawling. This means the search engine employs special software robots called spiders to build lists of the words found on websites. The process of building this list is called web crawling. The “spider” begins with popular sites and indexing words on its pages. It follows every link found within the site. Google itself usually uses 3 spiders or more at one time. Each spider keeps about 300 connections. At peak performance, Google (using 4 spiders) could crawl over 100 pages per second generating 600 kilobytes of data each second. Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the search engine must store the information. There are two key components to making information accessible to users: 1. The information stored with the data and 2. The method by which the information is indexed. Instead of just indexing the word and the URL, Google might store the number of times that word apears on a page. The data is then encoded to save storage space. Once compacted, the information is ready for indexing. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found quickly. The Index is built using a hash table. A formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word. Searching through an index invloves a user building a query and submitting through the engine. A query can be a single word at minmum (whatever it is that you want to know or search) but to make it more efective, Boolean operators such as AND, OR, NEAR, etc. can be used to refine the search to be more effective. These searches are literal searches i.e. the engine looks for the owrds or phrases exactly as they are entered. However, most people in the world would agree that when searching for something on Google, it is typed as a question to a human rather than to a machine. This is called a natural language query.
4. Impact of Google
It is no surprise or denying that Google is one of the most powerful inventions/tools of our lifetime. With the stroke of a few keys and a click of a mouse, almost any information can be unearthed in seconds. But some research suggests that the Internet is being used as a personal memory bank for information. This is known as the “Google effect”. This evidence is based on a series of four different experiments that were carried out by Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues at Columbia University. According to their experiments, people are more likely to loko for information on the Internet and remember where they found it, not the information itself. Also, they found that information that was not easily accessible on Google/the Internet was remembered more easily. Other negative impacts of Google include diminishing our critical thinking skills and injuring human emotion. Google allows people to focus on practical or useful knowledge instead of useful knowledge, which requires decision-making and human intelligence. The biggest impact of Google is the result of humans losing their ability to empathize. For example, humans feel no empathy after witnessing tragic events because the Internet takes responsibility on disciplining viewers to accept this as aform of mass entertainment for the public.
The postive impacts of Google and using search engines far outweigh the negative. The most common and perhaps most obvious postive impact is the ability to access information instantly at anytime. This is useful for research and academic use, allowing for authors and researchers to corroborate their ideas with other like-minded individuals, thus helping them form their own ideas and thesis. Google also allows us to multi-task and sort through useful information and information that is not releavant to what is required. Though these don’t seem like they outweigh the negative impacts, the latter factors themselves are hugely important in that they are what is responsible for the identity of this generation. Today’s world is able to ask anything, find any information, and be more consciously aware of other factors in the world that previous generations were not as privy to. An impact that is specific to the country of origin (USA) is that Google became one of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the country, ushering in new economic growth.
- People’s Impact on Google
People themselves did not have much impact on Google directly. The idea, starting from two bright-minded individuals, was created in the first place to make people’s lives easier when using the Internet – connect billions of pieces of information together. The need for simplicity, convenience and knowledge is what led to the idea. Investors played a huge role with Google and still do today. Had it not been for the investments early on, the creators of Google could not have started their company, which today has a net worth of around $350 billion.
6. Conclusion
Google is the 21st century lightbulb – revolutionary. Creators Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin wanted to create something that would allow people to find the information they wanted quickly and efficiently. By challenging the software norms of the time, they were able to create a search engine that was more efficient than their competition. This allowed for the creation of the Google search engine and company. From there, they became on of America’s wealthiest and most powerful companies allowing new economic growth and opportuniteis for the country. Despite some of the negative impacts of Google such as the “Google effect” and possible desensitization of human beings, Google remains the one of the greatest tools this world has to offer.
References
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[7] Latham, Tyger, Dr. “The Google Effect.” Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 16 July 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.
[8] Rivera, Miriam. “How Google Has Changed the World.” Entrepreneur. N.p., 29 Sept. 2016. Web. 19 Apr. 2017