Search

The Internet and Web are about sharing and using information. An important part of that process is finding information, often through search engines like Google.

So Much Information in So Little Time

Rummaging through books for the word “rosebud” might take days. But searching for “rosebud” on the Web—bigger than millions of books—takes under a second.

The Web also transforms the tedious process of looking up cross-references, like “see volume IV page 39.” They’re called clickable links on the Web, and they’re instant.

How Do Searches Find?

Automated “crawler” programs visit every available Web site, creating an index of the words they find. When users search on a word, the engine compares it to that index, ranking results based on nearby words and the number of links.

Searching for Profit

Searching the Web is immensely useful. But is it a profitable business? For a decade, the answer was “no.”

Web search was a perennial money loser. For engines like Lycos, AskJeeves, and later AltaVista and Google, banner ads brought income, but not profits. Then, in 2000 Google turned itself—and the search industry— into the iconic Web triumph by refining GoTo.com’s insight: advertisers would pay to place links near search results where keywords appeared, like “Petco.com” near “kitten”.

An auction feature let advertisers bid on keywords. AdWords, Google’s revenue generator, was born.

Google

Mid-Westerner Larry Page and Russian-born Sergey Brin met as computer science graduate students in the mid-1990s—just as fellow Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo were founding Yahoo!

Page proposed ranking Web pages by how often other pages link to them. The Stanford Digital Library Project supported an experimental search engine. Google was born.