google.com > Reviews (330)

What is Google?
Basically Google is a search engine. For those who are unsure (although with Ciao being based on the web I am sure you have used it or another similar to it) what a search engine is, it is a website where if you are looking for information about a particular company or website but are unsure where to locate it you simply enter relevant keywords into a webpage and it will search through its records to find possible matches.
For example if you wanted to go onto Ciao’s website but could not remember the web address the you would type in to Google ‘Ciao’ and press the search button (or hit enter/return) and it will very quickly display a list of results, sorted by how likely they are relevant to your search. You then scroll through the relevant options and then click on the title of the webpage that you want to visit. The website then automatically re-directs you to this page.
In very simplistic terms Google could be likened to a telephone directory allowing you to find a certain piece of information quickly. However, Google is far more advanced that this and certainly much quicker with most searches taking less than one second to complete.

History of Google
Google was setup by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who met each other at Stanford University in 1995. Google like many successful businesses was first setup in a garage of a friend. This building housed 3 staff from September 7 1998 until February 1999 when the number of searches Google performed each day numbered many tens of thousands.
In their new office Google was providing answers to approximately 500,000 searches per day. After major investment by outside companies and family and friends of many million US$ Google became very successful. This success was greatly improved when AOL/Netscape in 1999 selected Google as its web search service meaning searches totalled over 3 million a day! In the year 2000 Google were handling over a 100 million searches a day (approximately 69,444 a minute).
Today Google is based in Silicon Valley and is still going from strength to strength and daily search totals are more than 200 million.

Google’s websites
Google being based in America meant that there first webpage was obviously going to be American! Therefore Google.com was launched! However, realising that of course there are many people around the world who require a search engine (preferably in their native language and not producing results for American websites) Google have extended their websites so that they now have many different domains (web addresses) from countries such as France, Germany, Malta and many others all being written in the relevant native language. I believe the exact number is 97 different languages. This means that Google is now more accessible and can be used by non-English speakers to find information on the web.

Graphic design of Google
One of the best things about Google is its simplistic and easy to use user interface (what you see on your screen). I am going to describe Google.

co.uk as I use this most frequently so it will be unique to Google’s other websites. However, in my experience of using some of their other websites they have all followed the same basic design.
On loading Google a predominantly white background screen is displayed. Centred in the top middle of the page is Google’s logo. The letters are each coloured individually – G in blue, O in red, O in yellow, G in blue, L in green and E in red. Incorporated under the L letter is UK which is to remind you of which one of Google’s website you are on.
Displayed below the logo are five categories each with its own button in a horizontal layout allowing you to search for different types of information. These categories are ‘Web’, ‘Images’, ‘Groups’, ‘Directory’ and ‘News’. On loading the page ‘Web’ is automatically selected so the word is coloured white on a blue background, as opposed to the other options that are in blue writing on a light grey background. ‘Web’ is the option used to search for standard web pages and is the one that I personally use for the vast majority of the time. However, later on in the review I will explain what each of the different options allows you to do.
Below the five categories there is a blank text box which is where you enter the key words that you want to search for.
Then to the right of the text box there are another three different options:
·Advanced search – this loads a new web page and allows you enter a lot more information into a search than a quick search which is what Google does when you load the homepage.
·Preferences – this allows you to customise Google to your own requirements e.g. language results are displayed in, what filtering you require you results to go through (ideal if you have children and what there results they can view to be restricted) and number of results displayed on each page.
·Language tools – this includes features such as being able to translate web pages either from English to another language or another language to English. This is really useful if you wish to view a website in another language but are unable to speak it. Also you can translate text that you manually enter and search for results from a specific country.
Placed below the text box are two command buttons:
·Google search – this is what you click once you have entered the key words into the text box and it will then search for relevant web pages and display them in order of relevance on a new page, allowing you to select the required page.
·I’m Feeling Lucky – this is a quicker option of searching where if you enter a keyword, say for the sake of argument ‘BBC’ and press this button then Google will search for the relevant matches and automatically load the most relevant web page, in this case the BBC’s homepage. This is a very useful feature as if you are sure that the keyword you enter will supply the website you are looking for then it saves time in searching through results. For example I use this sometimes if I want to go on to Ciao as I know that if I enter ‘Ciao’ and press this button then the Ciao UK webpage will load.

Then below the two buttons are two option buttons (a small circle that if you click a black dot appears inside it), labelled ‘the web’ and ‘pages from the UK’. If for example you want to find a website of a company based in the UK then you simply leave the default option as ‘the web’ as it will include results from around the world. However, if you want results only from websites based in the UK then you select the ‘pages from the UK’ option.
Then below these buttons are more hyperlinks (words that tend to be coloured blue and when you click them they go to a new web page). These hyperlinks are Advertising, Services and Tools, Jobs,Press&Help, Go to Google.com and Make Google Your Homepage.
·Advertising is for the benefits of companies who want to pay so that there website address is featured on search result pages.
·Services and tools, tells you about the other services Google supply (I am not going to tell you about most of these otherwise I could be still writing this in 20 odd years)
·Jobs,Press&Help gives you more information about Google and advice on using the website.
·Go to Google.com somewhat surprisingly takes you to Google.com
·Make Google Your Homepage changes your web browsers setting so that every time you open it or click on the ‘Home’ button then Google is loaded.

Now I have talked about the graphic design of the main webpage so I will talk about the other four main options:
·Images – on clicking this button a new page is displayed allowing you to enter keywords that are relevant to the picture you want to find. For example if I wanted to find picture of a Mercedes Benz car then I would type in Mercedes Benz and hopefully the results that will be displayed will show relevant pictures. You can then click on an individual picture and be taken to the webpage it is located on (e.g. Mercedes Benz homepage)
·Groups – these are discussionforums (or whatever else you want to call them) and again you enter keywords and relevant results will be displayed.
·Directory – this is where web pages are grouped together in relevant sections e.g. Arts, Business, Computers etc… These main categories are then sub-divided again and again and again and again until results are divided into small enough sections.
·News – this is where Google compiles all the latest news stories from news agencies websites e.g. BBC, The Times and The Guardian. This means that you can get a variety of news from different sources without having to initially go onto loads of different websites.

How does Google operate when you do not get charged for its services?
Google relies on companies are willing to pay money so that there companies websites are displayed (e.g. advertising) on results pages from searches. For example I entered ‘travel’ into Google and on the results page there were two sponsored adverts across the top (expedia and some other company) and along the right hand side of the page more sponsored links were displayed (including companies such as Teletext holidays and Magic breaks)
These adverts whilst earning money and supporting Google they are unobtrusive to the user of the website and even on occasions they are often helpful as the website you are after could be listed there.

However, Google have a very strong policy against Pop-up windows (annoying adverts that load when you go on to a website) mainly because they are annoying and I believe this is one of the reasons why Google is so popular because not only are pop-ups annoying they also slow down how quickly you can navigate a website as you have to spend time closing them.

How do you get a web page listed on Google?
If you wish to have a sponsored link on Google then you have to contact Google’s advertising department for more information including prices etc…
If however you want your web page listed for free of charge and displayed along the normal results then you simply submit your homepages URL code e.g. www.madeupURLaddress.co.uk and then type in a brief description of your webpage which if written in the right way allows your webpage to be featured more highly in the results section. However, you do not need to enter all of the URL’s from your website as the Googlebot automatically searches from your homepage to all of the other pages that are linked from it.

What do I do if I change my website so the information Google holds is incorrect?
Regularly the Googlebot searches through all of the web pages listed on Google so if pages are removed links from Google will be deleted automatically and new pages will also be added to Google automatically.
If you wish to remove your website from Google you need to enter a file called robots.txt into your server root and the next time Googlebot searches your webpage it will be automatically removed from the system.

What are some of the other features Google has?
Google started of as a basic search engine however, they have now released a toolbar that you can download onto your web browser and every time you want to search for a website then you simply type in some keywords into the text box on the Google toolbar and press search and it will load the Google webpage listing all the results from your search. This means that you save time as you do not need to load Google’s homepage every time you want to search for something.
Also Google have their own online shop allowing you to buy merchandise from them e.g. T-shirts etc…

Conclusion
In my opinion Google is by far the best search available at the current time and I cannot see it being knocked off the top spot for some considerable time. They have got most things right from a simplistic user interface so that it is easy to use and quick to load meaning that you do not need the highest spec pc on the planet to load it or need the latest plug-in to have a wide variety of features as well as being able to do basic searches.

I really hope this review has been informative to read and I have tried to include all the major issues that people may want. However, I realise that this is by far not complete with all the other different things that could be included, although I think to include everything I would have to spend a couple of weeks constantly writing!

Lastly thanks for taking the time to read this rather long review and if anyone has ideas about how it could be improved be please let me know.