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“Google's
mission is to organize the world's informations and make it
universally accessible and useful”
 Google is a
public US corporation which designed and managed the Google search
engine.
It
has been created in 1996 by
two computer science students : Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This two
brilliant persons developed the hypothesis that a search engine must
analyse the number of links between the websites. It's supposed to
give more significant results. They thought the results would be
improved. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.
They formally create their company Google, Inc at a friend garage on
September 7, 1998. Their search engine was a big success because it
was based on a original idea. The website was attractive because of
its simplicity : it's a clean design without any animation which
imitate the great competitor Altavista.
Although, Google's site design hides the unique search capabilities
of this great web search engine. That's why Google users became many
and many. In 2004, Google handled 80% of the search requests on the
web.
Since 2000,
Google began to sell advertisements attached to the user query. This
ads are text-based to preserve original website design.
The name
Google is a play on the word Gogol which represent a one followed by
one hundred zeros. Google used this name to reflect the large amount
of informations that the company can organize. Google's leaders are
players : Google's headquarters are called Googleplex. A gogolplex
represents a one followed by a gogol of zeros.
Today,
Google is so much known that it is used as a non-official verb : to
google. It's defined like : “to perform a web search using
Google
search engine”
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What's
new with Google ?
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Google
released more and more web services for users in order to became the
leader on the Internet communications in the world. There are many
Google's services. The majority are free services for end-user but
some like AdWords are destinated to companies which want to make
publicity.
Let's see the new Google services.
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¬ What are the Google Services ?
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Google Mail
for example, is a webmail service which is different from the
existant ones. It contains a very large disk capacity of 2 Giga-bytes
instead of the usual 100 or 200 Mega-byte. This allows you to keep
your emails for a long time without deleting them. This is due to
Google mail service approach which tells that a person must not throw
anything away and on the contrary must keep each mail it received. A
Gmail user also read publicity like competitor's services but there
are discrete ads and there isn't any annoying pop-up. These ads are
based on the same system than Google AdsWord. The ads are targeted to
the mail content, so the ads are relevant with user self-interrest.
This system is completely different from traditional one and
statistics shows that it's more efficient too.
Last year
Google announced that it had planned to digitize millions of books in
order to make them readable on-line. This initiative may cause
serious financial damages to some companies like the AAUP
(Association of American University Presses) which says that is a
copyright violation. Other companies like
Random House, John Wiley & Sons, Simon & Schuster are
concerned by the project too. The main American publishers are very
anxious about Google Print, because of the potential impact on their
business. They recently found a agreement : Google users
will
only allowed to see a few pages of the book before buy it on-line
with the e-commerce system. Google insure that it will make links to
the main publisher Web sites appear. Google has already began to
digitalize a large number of books : majority of public domain books
from the most prestigious universities of United States are available
on the web. Google says that books that belongs to the public domain
will be fully accessible at no charges. Some companies are very
afraid by Google library digitalization because of piracy : nothing
prove that Google servers are enough secure. May Google be able to
protect digitalized copies of its copyrighted books ?
Google
Earth looks like a free virtual globe. It's the new program of Google
which allows anyone to visit the globe. The program is actually
available only on Windows platforms. MacOs and Linux versions have
been announced for the end of 2005. Google earth requires a good
Internet connection because of the large amount of data it need. It
use a sophisticated streaming technology which only download the data
you need. In fact, the program creates a connection to a server which
hold a lot of NASA satellite images with high resolution details.
This data is overlayed with other informations : parks, rivers,
roads, borders of countries, locations of national monuments, and so
on. Google Earth allows users to search for addresses, enter
coordinates, or simply use the mouse to browse to a location. Many
large cities are available in high enough resolution to see
individual buildings, houses, and even cars. Most places are
available at at least 1km of resolution. A part of Nasa collected
data is available in the public domain. Major cities of the United
States are also viewable in 3D. This cities include : New York,
Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. This feature is limited to
displaying grey blocky buildings. Purchasing a full-version of
Citysets renders buildings with significantly more details. You point
and zoom to any place on the planet that you want to explore. For
example, you can zoom to a specific address to check out an apartment
or hotel. You can also fly all over the world at the altitude you
want. Google Earth is free for personal use. No registration is
required for the free edition. There are two professional version
which are very expensive : 400$ for one computer licence.
Google
News is an automated news service provided by Google Inc. The Google
News website was introduced as a beta release in April 2002. There
are different versions for more than 20 languages. More languages are
added all the time. The service is fully automated without any human
editors. However, the sources included are determined by humans. In
March 2005 attention was called to Google's inclusion of the white
supremacist National Vanguard magazine. The resulting controversy
forced Google to remove that site from the service. The service
covers the news articles that appeared on the news websites. It
provides around the first 200 characters and links to the full
article. A special Google search engine is provided for this news.
You can sort the results by date and time of publishing or group
them. A user can also request for e-mail alert on a specific keyword
or on a topic in subscribing to Google News Alerts. Then news
articles which are matching with the keywords are send by e-mail.
Google
Talk is the new web-service from Google. It's a complete instant
messenger such as the famous MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. The
main difference is that Google Talk does'nt display any annoying
popup. For instance, this program works only on Windows operating
system and only in english. Other versions for different systems must
be developped in the future. Multiple langages will be added too. The
program allows the users to communicate with their contacts all over
the world by two means. The users can simply type what they want on a
simple keyboard like a traditional IRC (Instant Relay Chat) and the
message is relayed quickly to the other user. There is also an
alternative. It requieres a few extra things : a microphone and a
speaker. Then they can plug a microphone in their computer and
directly speak with their contact. The technology used to record the
voice is very new, so the quality of the voice is very great. Google
Talk works in collaboration with Google Mail. All contacts are
automatically imported to Google Talk and you can send mails from
Google talk, so it's very easy and intuitive to use. Companies give
the habit that you must pay to talk with people. Telephone
communications are very expensive. With Google Talk, every one can
speak
with any contact in the world at no charges. Google Talk just need a
Google Mail account to works. The simple problem that you can
experiencing is to create your account. The inscription is not trivial
: you can't directly create your account on the Google Mail
web-site. This is a big problem in fact ! How can you use these
services, if you can't create a simple mail account ! This is the
answer : you must be invited on Gmail from a Gmail user. Afterwards,
you will be able to invite other users too. Your won't be limited for
number of people you can invite. You may invite all your friends if
you want. Google trust in mouse to hear system to develop the number
of users. What are the limits of the system ? There is no limit of
time and the users can use Google Talk constantly at no charges. For
user convenience, Google Talk is also compatible with other instant
messenger programs like Trillian, Gaim, iChat of Psi, but completely
incompatible with MSN messenger.
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