Add


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."

Google History Video

Saturday, November 27, 2010

XHTML compatibility

As of September 2007, the HTML code for the AdSense search box does not validate as XHTML, and does not follow modern principles of website design because of its use of
  • non-standard end tags, such as </img> and </input>,
  • the attribute checked rather than checked="checked",
  • presentational attributes other than id, class, or style — for example, bgcolor and align,
  • a table structure for purely presentational (i.e., non-tabular) purposes,1 and
  • the font tag.2
1: using a table structure for unintended purposes is strongly discouraged by the W3C, but nevertheless does not cause a document to fail validation — there is currently no algorithmic method of determining whether a table is used "correctly" (for displaying tabular data or for displaying elements, that get proportionally wider or narrower when browser window resizes in width without active client side scripting).
2: the font tag is deprecated but does not fail validation in any XHTML standard.
Additionally, the AdSense advertisement units use the JavaScript method document.write(), which does not work correctly when rendered with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. The units also use the iframe HTML tag, which is not validated correctly with the XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPES.
The terms of the AdSense program forbid its affiliates from modifying the code, thus preventing these participants from having valid XHTML websites.
However, a workaround has been found by creating a separate HTML webpage containing only the AdSense advertisement units, and then importing this page into an XHTML webpage with an object tag. This workaround appears to be accepted by Google.



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)