Getting BeGoogled  

Another new search engine has come out of the computer labs at Stanford University, underscoring the enormous influence the school has exerted on the evolution of the Internet search industry.
Its called Google.Com, and was started recently as a research project by a group of Stanford graduate students who wanted to experiment with finding websites and other Internet documents according to a ranking criterion that judges the importance of a website based on how many other websites are linked to that page.
Stanford was the original home to Yahoo! when it was just the hobby of several engineering graduate students. They, of course, went on to fame and fortune as their personal Internet directory markedly grew by several thousands percent in tandem with the million percent growth of the overall Internet.
And, as if Yahoo! weren't enough, the founders of the highly-regarded Excite search engine also began their project at Stanford. Excite is now one of the top ten of engines, and just announced a mind-boggling $6.7 billion merger with the high-speed cable-access Internet services provider @Home.
The Google search technique is called PageRank,” by the Google creators. This makes for a type of relevancy ranking, whereby a page may be relevant to the topic or subject that you are looking for based on the fact that many other pages point to that particular website based on that topic. While this ranking of websites might overlook newly minted websites that no other home pages link to, Google will start noticing a new page as it starts getting attention from other websites.
An example of what Google might find would be a U.S. State Department document on the Net that is linked to by CNN.com, and Harvard University, and many other news organizations and academic institutions through their websites.
“You (the website) actually have to convince someone (their website) who’s important that you’re important,” according to Google’s co-founder Larry Page.
While this might sound somewhat circular, Page points out that it is a useful way of calculating “a website’s importance.”
In addition to the general “Search” button, there’s a “I’m feeling lucky” button which will take you directly to the first search result of whatever query you might have made — this is based on Google’s contention that the first result has the greatest chance of matching your area of interest. The “Lucky” button is particularly useful if you use a search keyword based on a company name.
For all searches, whenever you click open a page, the relevant term you are looking for — for example “Impeachment” — is highlighted in bold.
As to the size of the Google search index — thus far, Google has indexed over 60 million pages, and counting.
The Google team untied its apron strings to Stanford in fall of 1998 and incorporated as a company, with plans for expansion in the near future. In the meanwhile, Google is a user-friendly and useful search engine that has the added charm of not being just another look-a-like portal that has the same thing that every other portal has.
In fact, since Google.Com has a simple homepage — no news feed, or horoscope, or weather — its actually easier to use than the big portals like Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, etc., because the page is less busy.
To use Google, turn your browser to this address: