How google searches

In the beginning the Internet was but a confusing mass of
documents. Finding information,by searching the World Wide
Web, was nearly impossible until the first search engines came
along. Early search engines were like rudimentary life-forms
(Remember Yahoo! Search andAlta Vista?).

They got the job done, but as more people gained access to
the web, their limitations an
dependence on the information that content creators put on so-
called meta tags (strings of text that identified the content of the
page in the source code) meant that such engines were liable to
be abused.

Into this fast-expanding, yet messy space came Google. To cut
a long story short, what Google did was organise information a
lot better. Instead of depending on the text of a web page to
determine the search results, it determined the page's influence
using a variety of factors-including how many times a
page had been viewed or linked to. From those early days, Google
made searching the Internet reliable and over the past decade
has grown into the behemoth it is today.
But there is more to the Internet than Google and more to search
as well. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer told BT five years ago
that Google was just a flash in the pan, as Microsoft readied its
(then) latest search engine.

Microsoft did not get too far then, but laid the foundation for
an effort that churned out Bing,its search engine launched last
year. The engine uses a process similar to Google's 'PageRank'
algorithm and gets a boost from technology tailored to throw up
relevant results. The result: it has garnered one-fourth market
share in the United States.

Google is not standing still. "In the early days, much of the
Internet was static, your 'web crawlers' would go out every few
days, sometimes even weeks to find information. Today, in the
age of Twitter, the Internet happens in 'real time' and we
have to reflect that," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, present
at the company's recent Science of Search conference in Tokyo.

The way it delivers this is complex: New search
technologies look for statistical patterns while determining the
importance of one particular tweet message over thousands
of others as well as the number of followers the person who
wrote that tweet has. Juxtapose the volume of tweets - 2.7 million
every hour-and the brute force of the new technology and servers
that power it become apparent.That and Google's focus onsearch helps it stay top dog
despite challenges in China(Baidu is No. 1) and Japan
(Yahoo! is ahead in popularity).

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have spoken of their
fears of being ousted by a newcomer. That challenge could
come in the form of the likes of Wolfram Alpha, which queries a
structured database for answers.So, ask it about the 16th
President of the United States and it throws up not a link but a
page of facts on Abraham Lincoln. The scope of the
engine's results is limited given itis still a project in progress.
Example: A search for "World Cup" assumes it is a gene and
gives you a reference genetic sequence. Still, structured
searches are being closely watched.

Elsewhere, to catch up with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are
touting new contextual search services that give you search
results based on the page you are on. For instance, if you are
reading about Barack Obama's actions in the Gulf of Mexico BP
oil spill, highlighting "Obama" will not do a generic search for
Obama but for the US President and the oil spill. This is still a beta
(test) service rolled out to a few users.

Google, meanwhile, is also taking search to mobile devices - a
trend that its executives underscored at the Tokyo
conference. Google's voice search is today enabled on most
smartphones. Goggles allows users to take a picture from a
mobile phone and gives you a result on the image. Google plans
to make both mobile voice and image search faster and is
throwing a lot of its engineering resources behind that.
And its needs to. Google's biggest rival here is not Microsoft
but Apple whose iPhone is the dominant smartphone platform
in terms of mindspace. Apple recently bought Siri, which
makes a "mobile personal assistant" application that works
through voice commands. Silicon Valley is betting that the "human-
computer interface" will increasingly move away from
text to voice and images.

The world's top search engine also has on hand projects that
revel in the technology they use even if the revenue upsides are
not evident. In Tokyo, Alan Eustace, Google's Head of
Engineering, talked about a "Universal Communicator", an
idea rip-off from the Star Trek series. Here, an application on a
smartphone, with the help of machine translation, will be able
to translate any language spoken into it and into any other
selected. Singhal was even more bullish.

He spoke of a future where all Google services seamlessly
integrate into one another, where route-planning using
Google maps will take information from the web and
warn you in advance of traffic jams or deals at a mall five
minutes ahead of you and the like. Online search clearly has
some way to go.