As reported by the BBC, Google has just celebrated its fifth birthday. Starting out as a latecomer to the task of indexing the web — the Yahoo directory was founded in 1994 — Google quickly became the web’s favourite search tool by virtue of its consistently good search results. This was owing to two things: the Google founders came up with a unique algorithm called PageRank that looks at the links pointing to any given page, on the basis of which it assigns a rank to the page that pushes it higher up on the results page the more in-pointing links the page has (that’s simplifying things a bit, but it’s the basic idea). In addition, Google has always stuck to another smart principle which made it stand out from its competitors: it never sold its search results to the marketers. Whereas every other search engine accepts money from companies who want their web sites placed higher up in the results, Google has always refused to do that. Good for the user.
Over the years, Google has introduced a couple of useful services, to wit:
- Groups: this feature allows you to browse a huge amount of Usenet postings.
- Image Search: offers images as search results. Say you want to know what a porch looks like: plenty of pictures for you.
- Glossary: not quite finished yet, but still a useful tool that lets you search the web for definitions of technical terms, acronyms and the like. For example, you want to know what “ICT” stands for. Well, look no further.
- Advanced search: this isn’t really a feature that’s unique to Google since other engines and directories offer something similar too. Yet it’s very useful and allows you to refine your search, thus giving you better results.
In particular, advanced search is an invaluable tool for EFL learners. Unsure about a certain phrase you want to use? Set your search results to English and search for that phrase and any of its alternatives. The number of search results will give you an indication of how commonly used the phrase is — or if it exists at all. This method may have its pitfalls since not all English on the web is technically perfect or written by proficient writers, but if you keep this in mind, you will be able to put this functionality to a couple of good uses.
More Google web toys, in various stages of completion, are available at the Google Labs.
Happy birthday!
Comments
M Sinclair Stevens :: September 17, 2003
I use Google the same way to look up Japanese words and phrases. I’ve learned from experience that many words in my dictionary are literary terms and not used in everyday speech. Doing a Google search gives me a better idea of how a word is used in ordinary writing.
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It’s also useful for a quick definition check. Once you type in a word and hit search, you’ll see something similar to the following line in the nav bar— “Searched the web for comprehensive.” (in this case searching for comprehensive). In that line the word ‘comprehensive’ is a link to dictionary.com which gives you the definition. Makes looking things up just a little quicker and easier.