World Of Google: Previous products

History Of Google

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D.students at Stanford working on the Standford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies. In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such back links to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the Page Rank algorithm. Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996) Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes ...
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park California.

Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "google," which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros (although Enid Blyton used the phrase "Google Bun" in The Magic Faraway Tree (published 1941). Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Web Master Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Previous products

Applications that have been discontinued by Google, either because of integration with other Google products, or through lack of support.

Answers: Question and answer service, allowing users to pay researchers to answer questions. Google announced the closing of service on November 28, 2006. All past discussions have been publicly archived.

Browser Sync: Saved browser settings for backup and use on other installations of Mozilla Firefox.

Co-op: Search can be defined to specified web sites or areas of a site. Free to set up Google Co-op renamed Google Custom Search.

Deskbar: Bar on your desktop with a minibrowser built into it. It was discontinued when a very similar feature was added to Google desktop. Some people preferred Google deskbar for its ability to add custom searching and the mini-browser so you wouldn't have to open an actual window. The last release, version 5.95, had a .NET plugin.

Free Search: Free code to embed either web search or site search into another website. Discontinued in favour of Google Co-op Custom Search Engine.

Hello: Allowed users to send images across the Internet and publish them to blogs.

Joga Bonito: Soccer community site, similar to services such as MySpace, in that each member had a profile, and could join groups based on shared interests. The service allowed a user to meet other fans, create games and clubs, access athletes from Nike, and watch and upload video clips and photos.

Lively (Windows XP/Vista): 3D animated chat program launched on July 9, 2008 and closed December 31, 2008.

Local: Local listings service, before it was integrated with mapping. The merged service was then called Google Local, which was further renamed to Google Maps due to popular demand. Google Local still exist, but only for Google Mobile Search.

Google MK-14: A 4U rack mounted server for Google Radio Automation system. Google Inc. has sold its Google Radio Automation business to WideOrbit Inc.

Music Trends: Music ranking of the songs played with iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player and Yahoo Music. Trends were generated by Google Talk's "share your music status" feature.

Page Creator: Webpage-publishing program, which can be used to create pages and to host them on Google's servers. However, to focus on another Google Webpage-publishing service called Google Sites, new sign-ups are no longer accepted since 2008. And all existing content on Page Creator has been transferred to Google Sites in 2009.

Personalized Search: Search results personalization, now fully merged with Google Accounts and Web History.

Public Service Search: Non-commercial organization service, which included free SiteSearch, traffic reports and unlimited search queries. Discontinued in February 2007 and re-directed to Google Co-op.

Rebang (Google China): Google China's search trend site, similar to Google Zeitgeist. Currently part of Google Labs.

Related Links: Script that places units for related Web content, including pages, searches and videos, on the owner's Website, through embedded code. Discontinued in July 2007.

SearchMash: Search engine that means to "test innovative user interfaces." Among its features are the ability to display image results on the same page as web results, feedback about features, and continuous scrolling results. Aside from its privacy policy and terms of service, there is no Google branding on the site. Discontinued November 2008.

Shared Stuff: Web page sharing system, incorporating a Share bookmarklet to share pages, as well as a page for viewing the most popular shared items. Pages can also be shared through third party applications, such as del.icio.us or Facebook. It was discontinued on March 30, 2009.

Spreadsheets: Spreadsheet management application, before it was integrated with Writely to form Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It was announced on 6 June 2006.

Video Player (Mac OS X/Windows 2000/XP): Standalone desktop application that allowed you to view videos from Google Video.

Voice Search: Automated voice system for searching the Web using the telephone. Now called Google Voice Local Search, it is currently integrated on the Google Mobile web site.

Web Accelerator (Windows 2000 SP3+/XP/Vista): Uses various caching technologies to increase load speed of web pages. (Accelerator is no longer available for download.)

Writely: Web-based word processor created by software company Upstartle, who were acquired by Google on March 9, 2006. On October 10, 2006, Writely was merged into Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google X: Re-designed Google search homepage, using a Mac OS style interface. It appeared in Google Labs, but was removed the following day for undisclosed reasons.

Dodgeball: Social networking site built specifically for use on mobile phones. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby. (Discontinued January 2009). Google Latitude now provides most of Dodgeball's functionality integrated into the Google Maps service.

Catalogs: Search engine for over 6,600 print catalogs, which are acquired through Optical character recognition. (Discontinued January 2009)

Google Notebook: View and add notes to your Google Notebook. (Discontinued January 2009)

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