Outer Court

Links - Googlosophy

Google, as you surely know, is the world's most popular search engine, with about 200 million searches every day and over 3 billion spidered pages. Google fuels pages such as Yahoo!, CNN, or Netscape. There is a whole "Googlosophy" behind this, with new terms popping up -- like Googled, or Googler. And a new career opportunity; become SEO (Search Engine Optimizer). But you must study the science and art of Googlology (the technical knowledge of the Google search engine). Well, no better way to start than here.

The Many Faces of Google

"We are trying to be successful without being evil."
-- Silverstein, Google's third member of staff.

Google Answers: Ask a question for a price ranging from 2 - 200 US-dollar. Any of the 500 Google Researchers worldwide will attempt to promptly answer it. There are many experts on this site that make the service one of the most worthwhile "human" search & research engines.

Google Sets:Enter one or more words, and let Google create an expanded set, guessing related terms. (Part of the experimental Google Labs.)

Google Glossary:Let Google define any term for you. Works quite well. (Part of the experimental Google Labs.)

Google News:You probably know this one; news headlines that are pulled automatically from other sites and categorized accordingly. You can refresh this page every hour (or more often) and find new stories.

Google Zeitgeist: "Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google". Statistics on user search behavior, updated frequently.

Google H4x0r: Just a gimmick; the Google search interface wrapped in hacker lingo.

For more faces of Google take a look at Google's Sitemap.

About and Behind Google

"To be or not to be, that is Google."
--Anonymous.

Google Blogoscoped: My Google blog.

I Help You - Google Search Engine: Great forum on Google.

MicroDoc News: The former Google Village. Much interesting Blog information on all things Google.

Google Alert: They run daily searches on a search query of your choice and email you when new pages come up. (Formerly known as "Googlert".)

Search Engine Watch: You can subscribe to the free newsletter found on the page. Just enter your email address, wait for the confirmation request, and reply to it. Then everyday you will have the top stories in your email box.

Google Watch: "A look at how Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies are undermining the Web."

Google Under The Scope: An extensive FAQ on Google.

TouchGraph Google Browser: Creates a dynamic visual mapping of interrelated sites. Highly interesting tool but known to crash some browsers.

Quick Google Glossary

"Google taught me everything I need to know about life."
-- Anonymous.

Egosurfing, Autogoogling: To research yourself on Google.

GAR: A Google Answers Researcher.

Google PageRank: Google's system to determine the importance of a Web site (and its position in a search result). It's heavily based on links one gets from other pages. The algorithm behind this was originally formulated by Stanford University's Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page in "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine".
To quote Google on the subject of PageRank:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.""

GoogleBot, Spider, Crawler, Bot: The automat that will "spider" (collect information about) all your pages found online. The more active your site is (the more often you update documents with changes), the more often the GoogleBot will come back. This can be e.g. every day, or every month. A "robots.txt" file on your server root can prevent certain documents from being read by the GoogleBot. (Find out more about the importance of robots.txt.)

Google, Googled, Googling: To research someone else online using a search engine.
"I did a little googling on my boss."
"I think I've been googled by my fiancee."
(Also; to be spidered by the GoogleBot.)

Google bombing: The sport of attempting to manipulate Google's search result by boosting a certain site.

Googular: How popular one is in terms of Google PageRank (your "Googularity"). In other words, the higher the googularity, the more googular.

Googler, Googley, Googlies,: Someone working for Google.

Googlecentric: To only think about Google when it comes to search engines, search engine optimization, etc. "She has a Googlecentric world view, she never even touched Yahoo."

Googleplex: The Google headquarter in Mountain View, California, near the Shoreline Regional Park wetlands.

Googlorama: Any site, virtual or real, show-casing a variety of Googlorabilia (think Google Store).

Link farm: Trying to score a better PageRank by using many sites that share links (increasing ones link popularity). Might get one banned from Google.

Metagoogle, metagoogling: Trying to find information about Google, using Google itself. (I did not find any references for this online so must propose it as new word.) E.g. for this page, I had to do a lot of metagoogling in order to collect relevant information.

SEO: A Search Engine Optimizer.

Google's Recipe for Success

I think Google is so successful because it's:

Google Games

Who am I

This fun game is a variant of egobrowsing. Enter your first name, followed by " is" in phrases in the Google search engine, and the first ten sentences showing up will tell you about yourself.

For example, if I do it like this ...

"philipp is"

... the following results show up:

Philipp is right ...
Philipp is gifted in so many ways ...
PHILIPP is president of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta ...
Philipp is a 1998 recipient of the Rotary Award for Teacher Excellence ...
Philipp is resolved to make the relationship work, and succeeds for a time ...
Philipp is too much busy with his job ...
Philipp is originally from Germany ...
Philipp is set to outdo himself ...
Philipp is a healthy kid with no real sickness ...

Of course you can also play this game with your friends names! Or competing institutions... so let's do it with "Google" in direct comparison to "AltaVista" and see:

Google is ...AltaVista is ...
'feeling lucky'a world leader in search technology
so popularVery Difficult to Optimize For Right Now
decentralizing[censored]
thathaving a limited time sale
able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search enginesno longer indexing the meta keyword tag
three times bigger than the experts thinkThe Best Site For SEO & Webmaster Benchmarking
rewarding our informational sites quote nicely thankyouusually very quick
GooodRaging
unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking fora majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc.
not an anomalyFar From Alone

You can also play the Googlefactor competition variant.

Who owns the alphabet

Which page does Google return first when you enter a single letter from the alphabet? Let's try it. Following the letters will take you to Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" for that letter, while I give a sample of who "owned" the letter at the time I tested this, February 2003:

A - Apple
B - B'Tselem
C - CNET.com
D - D-Link Systems, Inc.
E - E! Online
F - F-Secure
G - The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
H - H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
I - Disney Online
J - j-phone.com
K - K Desktop Environment Home
L - LEXPRESS.fr
M - 3M Worldwide
N - SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer
O - O'Reilly & Associates
P - Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Q - Q4music.com
R - (try!)
S - (try!)
T - (try!)
U - (try!)
V - (try!)
W - (try!)
X - (try!)
Y - (try!)
Z - (try!)

Googlewhacking

A "Googlewhack" (also, "searchwhack", or in German, Knackdengoogle) is a two-words search (without quotation marks) that returns only a single result. The term was coined by Gary Stock. As soon as you found a Googlewhack and published it online, it's likely to become obsolete, because now Google finds more than one result! The rules to this game: The word must be in the dictionary, and the result page should not simply be a page of word listing. Examples of the past time include "insolvent pachyderms", "anxiousness scheduler", "illuminatus ombudsman" and "panfish interrogation". Related to this is the triplewhack (with words all the same length) multiwhack (beginning with sequential letters).

Google Smackdown

This game consists of two words/ phrases "battling" each other for web success using Google's result page count. Take this Google Smackdown challenge for the better James Bond actor:
1. Sean Connery (232,000)
2. Roger Moore (89,900)

In other words, the original James Bond Sean Connery is 2.58 times more popular than his successor Roger Moore! (And let's not even try George Lazenby...)

Bloogle (Twoogle)

The Growlers page will let you do Google-powered madlibs, like ...
"I think that it's safe to say *nouns* are superiour to *nouns*."
... results in ...
"I think that it's safe to say analogies are superiour to tastes."

Funny Google URLs

The Google URL world is full of copycats and security measurements. It's all about misspelling the Google URL: Google itself wants to make sure to catch everybody who wants to actually land on the Google website, while the other websites try to attract more traffic by intentionally misleading them.

These ones are actually Google:

However these are not:

This one is weird:

 

GOOGLE is a trademark of Google Inc.

 

 
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