google.com > Reviews (330)

At a quick glance Google.com doesn’t seem to be a very advanced search system to be using. It doesn’t have a cluttered home page (unlike other search engines such a Altavista), infact it seems to be lacking, there are only a few things that you can do from the home page. I like this, the interface is very friendly and inviting and not too confusing. Having used Google for some time you also find out that there are many other things that Google can do, which make it one of the best search engines availabletoday on the internet.

** Searching, Design and Speed **
Because of the very simple design to the Google website, with very few graphics, the website is very fast to load. It is also very fast when performing a search, with the results appearing very quickly, they even estimate how long the search took (I just performed a search and it took 0.18 seconds!).

The results page is also of a very simple design, but this is good as it make the page load quicker. All that is displayed is a small header, some information about how many pages were found, which results you are view currently, the time it took to search and the links. The links have the following information available to users, the link, some information about the website, a category for the website, the page that will be loaded and the option to show more results from that particular website (quite useful). At the bottom of the page you get links to the next ten results pages and an advert trying to get you to use the Google toolbar (more about this later).

Advanced Searching – To perform an advanced search all you have to do is click on the “Advanced Seach” link available on all Google pages. This takes you to the advanced search page in which you can perform an advanced search! You can search with all of the words input, for an exact phrase input, for any of the words input and without the words input. You can also determine how many results you want to see per page, this is either 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 results. You can search for pages in all languages or a certain languages (of which there are numerous to say the least!). You can search for pages updated at anytime, the last year, the last six months or the last three months. You can also search for pages where the input data occurs anywhere in the page, in the title or in the url. Along with this you can resrict the results using “SafeSearch”, this filters out pages which have offensive content in all the languahes that it supports.

Along with this there is a topic search, that allows you to search for all things to do with “Apple Macintosh”, BSD Unix, Linux and US Government websites. You can also search the content of most of the education websites around the world. So you might if you went to the University of Portsmouth want to search the content of their website, this can be done through Google!

** Preferances **
In this section you can set defaults like what language to search for webpages in, which language to display the Google interface in, whether to have SafeSearch on all the time, how many results to have per page or whether to put the results into a new browser window.

In order for this to work your browser must have cookies enabled, otherwise this won’t work.

** Web Directory **
Along with Google fantastic websearch it also has quite a good web directory, which can also be searched by Google. If you don’t know how to use this directory there is an in depth help file on how to use it, just click Directory Help. The directory has the usual sections such as Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, World, Home, Kids and Teens, News, Recriation, Reference, Regional, Science, Shopping, Society and Sports. Each of these sections has numerous sub-section, which ate filled with useful links to websites that may interest you. This is directly accessible at directory.google.com.

** Groups **
Along with the web directory service there is also a Groups service, which is a news group service. This allows people to post questions or what ever they want and for people to reply to these. This is very useful if you are looking for the answer to some obscure programming problem or something of a similar nature. You can browse through the various sections that are available or perform serches of the news groups. I haven’t used this much, but if it is like the rest of the Google product this will be very good.

** Google Toolbar **
This is a very useful bit of software, this is a bar which sits with the rest of your toolbars in Internet Explorer (only unfortunatly). It allows you to perform a Google search from where ecer you are on the internet. It also allows to to perform a search on the website that you are currenly viewing along with searching the current page for words that you may want to find.

This is very easy to download and install as long as you have sufficient rigts to do so on your computer and you have the correct security settings that allow you to install software like this. Other than that, it is a very easy installation process.

The System Requirements for this are Microsoft Windows (95, 98, ME, NT, or 2000) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (5.0 or 5.5) .

** My Thoughts **
Google.com and Google.co.uk (a localised version) are very easy websites to use and get you the information that you are searching for very quickly indeed. If you are fed up with a slow search engine come and try out Google, you will be surprised.