What do you do when you are overtaken by the urge to cook something exotic but are not sure how on earth to rustle up a Baked Alaska? What do you do when your infant won’t stop hiccupping in the middle of the night? What do you do if you want to stay in touch with latest trends and fashions in the glamour world? And how do you get to see what your house looks like from above? The answer to all these questions is “YOU GOOGLE IT!”.

In September of 1998, a couple of lads called Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, got together in a garage and GOOGLE was born. Theirs is the original rags to riches story; perhaps their riches now defy even their own wildest dreams. The transformation has taken less than 10 years since the two young men got together, both of them college students and dreamed up Google a search engine. It has been a paradoxically long and short journey for them to where they are now, heads of a huge corporation having thousands of interconnected computers and thousands of employees.

Google’s simple mantra ‘Don’t be evil’ is quoted by Page who said, "We have kind of a mantra of 'don't be evil,' which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone. So, if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing." Brin is quoted as having said "And as we go forward," added Brin, "I hope we're gonna continue to use technology to make really big advances in how people can live and work."

Google’s search engine far and away occupies the largest market share in terms of web based searches. It is followed by Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.

Google uses something called the Page Rank algorithm for ranking pages that match certain criteria. This is done on the basis of a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the Page Ranks of the pages linking to them. If this sounds rather incomprehensible, do not worry, it is a bit incomprehensible. And this is not the only incomprehensible methodology that Google use, they have other secret, inscrutable criteria to rank pages.

What the Google search engine does is, it caches and indexes files in different kinds of formats such as Word Documents HTML files, PDF documents Excel work sheets and many others.

Since it is so important for a web site to show up in the result page of a Google search, a whole business of search engine optimization (SEO) has come up, which seeks to ensure that when a user types a query into Google’s search engine the chances of a particular page coming up, rise. There are mainly two factors affecting SEO, “on page” and “off page” factors. On page factors include body copy, title tags, headings and visual attributes. Off page criteria include page rank and anchor text. Keywords are therefore very important to determine whether the page will show up in Google’s search results: the higher up in the page the keywords occur, the better it will affect ranking.

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We live in a world that has irrevocably and irretrievably altered by the Internet. I wonder what we did before the advent of the internet! We have come to be so very reliant on the net for our everyday functioning, that it is a marvel that we and generations before managed perfectly well without it.

The internet has now almost become synonymous with the most ubiquitous of presences on the World Wide Web, that is Google. What Google has done is to make available to us an absolute plethora of whatever information that we may desire, literally at the press of a few buttons. The search engine concept is so inextricable intertwined with the very word Google that Google has come to mean search; it has become a synonym for search. A few years ago the sentence ‘just Google it’ may have made no sense, but now it makes perfect sense. Any question you may have, for instance ‘what is in the prescription drug that has been prescribed by my doctor for my ulcer’ will most likely be answered by doing a Google search.

What Google’s search engine has done is, give into the hands of the ordinary man, that most powerful of tools, that of knowledge, of access to information. It’s mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". No matter how simple or complicated the query, Google’s search engine will most likely be able to shed some light on it.

Google has thereafter added several refinements to its search engine capabilities; such as the image search, or making available pages only from a particular geographical region as specified by the searcher. Additionally a searcher can access a calculator, currency converter, dictionary, maps, shopping and other incredibly useful tools provided by Google. Google has been customized, or localized to the extent that its services are available in a multitude of languages from around the world. And Google has a sense of humor: one of the languages available is Klingon (the fictitious language used in the Star Wars films)! With billions of web pages out there on the World Wide Web, Google’s search engine processes hundreds of millions of queries a day.

The influential nature of Google’s search engine and the enormous impact it has, has given rise to a whole new industry, namely that of SEO or search engine optimization. Since the Google search engine is the most accepted and used one, Google’s rankings have been come a consuming obsession with many. The attempt to influence and perhaps even manipulate these rankings is no less than an industry. Consultants, experts, self-confessed specialists have been born who claim to raise the rank of your website on Google’s search engine. The algorithm employed by Google to determine this elusive rank is the subject of much speculation, discussion, research, analysis and all manner of study. The methods employed to sway rankings are often far from ethical, giving rise to the terms ‘White Hat SEO’ and ‘Black Hat SEO’.