A Quick Tour of Google

A Quick Tour of Google

Google is far more than a search siteit has grown to be a sizable collection of services and tools, and the collection is getting larger all the time. No longer is Google a single search site; instead, it's a conglomeration of multiple sites. And no longer can you even call it Web-based because Google now includes software that you download and run on your PC.

This book often refers to tools and services. Although there is a lot of gray area in the definitions of these two terms, generally a service is a website run by Google. So, for example, the bargain-finding site Froogle (www.froogle.com) is a service because it's a Google-run website; you have to visit it on the Web to use it. Google's image-management software Picasa (www.picasa.com), on the other hand, is software that you download to your PC, and so it considered a tool.

Google and Your Privacy

Google and Your Privacy

If people fear one thing about Google, it's that Google might invade their privacy in some way. That's a natural fear. As Google creates more and more services, it can gather an increasing amount of information about you. And there are also worries that Google tracks all of your searches, and it could then easily create a personal profile of you and sell the results to the highest bidder.

If you want the whole story of Google's privacy policy, head to the Google Privacy Center at www.google.com/privacy.html. It spells out in a good deal of detail what information Google finds out about you and what it does with that information.

But here, in a nutshell, is the scoop: When you create a Google account, you need to enter basic informationyour email address and password. Google doesn't share that information with any other website.

When someone visits a Google site or does a search using Google, Google servers record information about that visit, including the IP address of the visitor, the URLs, and the date and time of the request.

Sign Up and Manage Your Google Account

Sign Up and Manage Your Google Account

Many of the Google tools or services that are websites, such as Gmail, require that you sign up for a Google account. After you have set up an account, you won't have to set it up again. You can use your single Google account as the centerpiece for all of Google's services.

To sign up, head to www.google.com and click Sign In. On the right side of the page that appears, click the Create an account now link. The page shown in the nearby figure appears.

Fill in an email address, enter a password and retype it, choose your location, type what you see as the weird-looking text in the Word Verification area, read the Terms of Service, and then click I accept. Create my account. That's all it takes; you're signed up and ready to go. When you need to use a Google service from now on, type your email address and password when prompted.

After you have an account, click the My Account link if you want to change your personal information, such as your password and name. From your account page, you also see a list of services for which you've signed up, and you can look for other services that you might want to try.

Fill out this page and click I accept. Create my account. Then you are ready to use all of Google's services.

Note

Even if you don't sign up for a Google account, many of Google's services and tools are still available to you. For example, you can still use Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Picasa, and several other services and tools. And if you only want to search the Web, you don't need to sign up for an account, either.

How to Download and Install Google Tools

How to Download and Install Google Tools

Many Google tools live on the Web and don't require you to install any special software. For example, Gmail, Froogle, and Blogger are all websites; to use them, you only need to point your browser to the right page.

But other tools are software programs that live on your PC, and they require that you download and install them before you can use them. (The Appendix, "Google Tools and Services," lists all the Google tools available to you.) All are installed in the same basic way, as outlined in the following steps. The Google Toolbar is used as an example of how to install software. (To see other downloadable tools, go to www.google.com, click the More link at the top of the page, and then click the Google Downloads link on the left side of the page.)

1. Go to the web page that hosts the software. When you get there, you see a link for downloading the software. The nearby figure shows the download page for the Google Toolbar, at http://toolbar.google.com.

   To download the Google Toolbar, click the Download Google Toolbar button. Pretty simple, huh?

How Google Works

How Google Works

Before you can understand how Google works, you probably should have a basic idea of how the Web works. When you visit a website, your browser is actually contacting a web server, a computer whose job is to deliver web pages. So when you click a link, your browser contacts the server and says, "Send me this page." The server takes the request and then sends the page to the browser, which displays it on your computer.

Key Term

Server A computer whose job is to perform a specialized task and deliver information. For example, a web server serves up websites, while an email server sends or receives email.

Okay, now that you have that basic background down, let's see how Google works.

In some very basic ways, Google works just like other search engines. Its basic operations are exactly the same. Like all search engines, Google is composed of three parts:

• A spider, also called a crawler This spider "crawls" the Web and finds content on web pages.
• An indexer This software takes all the information the spider gives it and creates a giant index that can be searched.
• A query engine This is what takes your search request, sends it to the indexer, and reports the results to you.

Key Term

Search engine A site that allows you to search the Web.

The Spider

The spider part of the Google search engine is an automated piece of software, also called a robot, that requests many thousands of pages from hundreds of websites simultaneously. When it finds links on pages, it follows those, and requests those as well.

The main Google spider is the GoogleBot, and it essentially crawls the Web once a month. Obviously, many sites change more than once a month, and so Google also has a crawler named FreshBot that crawls pages constantly.

The Indexer

The spiders send information about all the pages they find to the indexer part of the search engine. The indexer then does a pretty amazing jobit creates an index of every word on every page sent to it by the Google spider. Not only does it index every word and every URL, it also keeps a record of where every word is on every page.

Multiple copies of this index are kept on various Google servers. A single server wouldn't be able to keep up with all the search requests that are done.

The Query Engine

The only part of Google that you see is the query engine, and you only see part of that. It's the public face of Googlethat inviting search box at the top of Google pages.

When you type a search term, a Google web server sends your request to the indexer, which is housed on multiple indexing servers. The index servers look through the index and match what they find with your request. The index server then sends that information to document servers, which retrieve the correct information and format it so your browser can understand it. That formatted information is then sent to your browser.

And it all happens in a fraction of a second.

Google's Special Sauce

All this search engine logic is nothing new or revolutionary. This technology has been around for years, long before Google was a glimmer in its founders' eyes.

So why is Google so good at what it does?

Google uses better algorithms than any other search engine, and constantly refines them. Algorithms are sets of rules for performing a particular task. In Google's case, its algorithms are responsible for taking your search request and deciding which results to show you.

Key Term

Algorithm A set of rules for performing a task. In Google's case, algorithms are what determines which pages it says match your search requests.

Google's algorithms aren't particularly easy for mere mortals to understand, they're changing all the time, and they're not made public. Google uses more than 100 factors in its algorithms. For every search you do, it considers all of those factors and then calculates a score for every possible matching page. The page with the highest score is the first search result. The page with the second-highest score is the second search result, and so on.

Why Use Google?

Why Use Google?

Let's start off with the most basic question: Why bother to use Google? After all, there are other search sites out there.

It's true that there are other search sites, but none are as fast or effective as Google. Google doesn't necessarily scan more of the Web and index more websites than any other search engine. That's not really what's important. What it does better than any other site is deliver more accurate results. At times, the results seem so uncanny that you almost feel as if Google is reading your mind. (You'll learn more details about why Google is so accurate in the next section, "How Google Works.")

Note

You might have heard that a child has been named after Google, but did you know that an ant has been named after the site as well? The entomologist Brian Fisher discovered a new species of ant and named it Proceratium google, to honor the mapping program Google Earth. Fisher received help from the Google Earth team when he needed to combine an online repository of ant data (called AntWeb) with Google Earth. Thanks to the work, scientists can search for ant species by location and plot ant habitats in three dimensions. By the way, here's a tidbit about the Proceratium google species: It lives in Madagascar and eats only one kind of foodspider eggs. If you don't believe me, do a Google search.

About Google

Was the Internet searchable before there was Google?

Sometimes it seems as if it wasn't. True, there were other search sites, such as www.altavista.com, www.askjeeves.com, and www.yahoo.com. But anyone who used those sites remembers that, although they made it easy to search for something, they made it very difficult to actually find anything.

Then Google came along, and suddenly the world changed. It applied its "special sauce" to searching, and the rest is history. Put simply, no search site on the planet comes near to Google in the speed and accuracy of its searches.

But if you think searching is all that Google is about, you're missing a lot. Google offers loads of services in addition to searching, such as maps, email, personalized home pages, free blogging, image-editing software…the list is long and getting longer every day.

This blog will help you get the most out of using Google and all of its tools. Whether you want to blog, send and receive mail, take a virtual trip around the world, find a long-lost high school sweetheart, get a great deal online, or a lot more, you've come to the right place.