How to Make the Most Out of Google
Google handles more than 70 percent of the world’s online search requests, making it one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Its unassuming interface may appear a bit simple, but if you know where to look, there are a lot of hidden treasures inside the search engine. This guide will show you how to make the most out of google and give you a peek behind the curtain.
Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They named it after the mathematical term googol, which represents a number with 100 zeros. Google went public in 2004 and is now owned by parent company Alphabet Inc. It operates a variety of Internet services, including the search engine of the same name and Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps and more.
When you search on Google, it looks for pages that match your query. Some pages are already known to Google because it has visited them before, while others are discovered when a link from a known page leads to a new page. Google then adds the new page to its list of search results.
To do all this, Google runs a massive network of interlinked computers, called servers. These servers run a proprietary piece of software code that manages storage, processing and data analysis. Each server is a multiprocessor personal computer connected to hard drives, and they are grouped together in data centers around the globe. There are 11 of these massive data centres, each with several hundred thousand servers.
Besides running searches, Google also keeps cached copies of pages that have been previously searched by users. This allows it to offer more relevant search results for some queries. You can use the –cached option when searching to only find cached versions of web pages instead of live ones.
Another useful feature is the ability to do a Boolean search by using OR and NOT between different search terms. For example, searching “pizza hut” AND “software engineer jobs” will only return results that contain both phrases. This is helpful if you’re looking for very specific information and don’t want related search results to skew your results.
In 2001, Google introduced AdWords, which allowed advertisers to place their ads above the organic search results on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The same year, Google began showing image results in some searches. Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez’s jungle print dress at the 2000 Grammy Awards became a viral image that led to many searches for “jungle print.” In 2017, Google Lens was released, which lets you search by pointing your phone camera at objects in the real world. This feature is currently limited to certain Android smartphones, but it will soon be available on other devices as well. It can also be used with Google Assistant. Google keeps a blog that helps you keep up with news about the company, as well as an official podcast.
