Mind googling
I can't resist any longer. The time has come to write about Google, the web's ur-site and, in my view, one of the most staggering human inventions ever. Whatever it is in the information universe you seek, simply go to google.com, punch in the keywords and va-voom! More results than you can imagine in less time than divides first and second place in an Olympic sprint final. All I need to do is type in the names of my obsessions-Prospect magazine, the CIA or Britney Spears-and up pops the relevant website.
Google was born as part of a research project at Stanford University in 1998, at a time when other sites, such as Lycos, Altavista or Yahoo, were the premier portals on the web. Unlike them, Google presented itself unadorned: a simple white screen with a search box in the middle of it, shorn of advertising. The competitors have since been crushed and the figures for Google have climbed to 150m daily searches in more than 60 languages; 2 billion indexed web pages; the fourth most visited site in the world.
The Chinese government recently attempted to ban it. New Yorkers, keen to check the pedigree of the person they are dating, key their name into the site in a process that has become known as "googling." And the company has grown to this prominence and profitability (an estimated US$65m last year) with virtually no marketing expenditure, relying instead on word-of-mouth recommendation.
There are a number of features to the site that even old googlers might like to try. If you want references, say, to Christopher Hitchens on the website Arts and Letters Daily, simply key into the search box: "Christopher Hitchens" site:aldaily.com. The double speech marks tell the search engine to look for those words, in that order. The command "site:" can also be suffixed by requests for certain kinds of web page. For example, "Iraq" site:gov.uk delivers all the references to Iraq on British government websites. Google has masses of terms dedicated to refining searches or seeking out specific kinds of information. (Hardcore enthusiasts of these things can find them discussed, ad nauseum, on researchbuzz.com.)
I also recommend Google News which produces computer-generated pages of news stories culled from the world's media and is updated constantly. Because a machine makes editorial decisions, you'd assume that the pages would be clunky to read. What's remarkable is that by sifting the most commonly occurring stories throughout the world, Google has created an engrossing news channel with an impressively international perspective.
There are other sites snapping at Google's heels, such as Alltheweb, Teoma and Wisenut. But it's hard to see any of them making a serious challenge.
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This is the last site seeing for a while. Thanks to everyone who sent suggestions and advice
