Google's main page's unusually spartan design, uncluttered appearance and quick loading time have contributed greatly to the site's mass appeal.

Google is a search engine owned by Google Inc. whose mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The largest search engine on the web, Google receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services. This is a screenshot of a copyrighted website, video game graphic, computer program graphic, television broadcast, or film. ... This is a screenshot of a copyrighted website, video game graphic, computer program graphic, television broadcast, or film. ... The success of the Google search engine was mainly due to its powerful PageRank algorithm and its simple, easy-to-use interface. ... Google, Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG), is a U.S. public corporation, initially established as a privately-held corporation in 1998, that designed and manages the Internet Google search engine. ... Strategic planning is a way to identify and move toward desired future states. ...

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. As of June 2005, Google has indexed 8.05 billion web pages, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion Usenet messages — in total, approximately 10.4 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Froogle, and Google Desktop Search. See list of Google services and tools for a complete list. A webpage or web page is a page of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ... Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... A newsgroup is a repository, usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ... To help compare orders of magnitude this page lists dimensionless numbers between 109 and 1012. ... In computer science, a cache (pronounced kăsh) is a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data are expensive (usually in terms of access time) to fetch or compute relative to reading the cache. ... Web indexing (or Internet indexing) includes back-of-book-style indexes to individual websites or an Intranet, and the creation of keyword metadata to provide a more useful vocabulary for Internet or onsite search engines. ... Google News is an automated news compilation service provided by Google Inc. ... Froogles main page Froogle is a price engine website launched by Google Inc. ... Google offers a variety of services and tools besides its basic web search. ...

History

The Google search engine began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University graduate students who developed the theory that a search engine based on a mathematical analysis of the relationships between websites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Photo of Larry Page from Google. ... Sergey Mihailovich Brin (born August 1973 in Moscow, Russia) is an American entrepreneur. ... For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ... Backlinks are incoming links to a website. ...

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. The web site called "Google!" (with an exclamation mark) went live at the domain name google.com. They formally founded their company of the same name, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Brin's lack of interest in writing HTML code used for designing web pages meant that the site's design used a minimal interface. A domain name is a name of a computer on the Internet that distinguishes it from the other systems on the network. ... September 7 is the 250th day of the year (251st in leap years). ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Cafe Borrone, adjacent to Keplers Bookstore in the Menlo Center, is a popular lunch spot in downtown Menlo Park. ... In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ...

Google introduced advertisements in 2000, which were sold by the keyword so that they would be more relevant to the end user, and the ads were text-based in order to reduce loading time and to keep the page uncluttered. In September 2001, Google's ranking mechanism PageRank was awarded a U.S. patent. The patent was officially awarded to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80 percent of all search requests on the Internet through its website and clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN ¹. Google's share of web search fell in 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in favor of their own. In computer science, a keyword is an identifier which indicates a specific command. ... PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. ... ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or substance (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and useful. ... Yahoo! Inc. ... America Online, or AOL for short, is a corporate online service provider and Internet service provider (ISP). ... Cable News Network (CNN) is a cable television network that was founded in 1980 by Ted Turner & Reese Schonfeld [1] [2] (although the latter currently is not recognized in CNNs official history). ...

The Google search site includes humorous features such as cartoon modifications (called "Google Doodles") of their logo for special occasions, the option to display the site in fictional or humorous languages such as Klingon and Leet, and April Fool's Day jokes about the company. Google Doodles are modifications of the Google logo created by the company for use on holidays, birthdays of famous people, and major events, like the Olympics. ... The Klingon language or Klingonese (tlhIngan Hol in Klingon) is a constructed language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount Pictures and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. ... The ELinks web browser, set to Leet language, on the Leet language version of Google. ...

It has been conjectured that Google's future is personalized searches, using the data that is gathered from their Orkut, Gmail, and Froogle products to give results based on an individuals previous actions. In fact, there is a Personalized Google Search Beta in Google Labs, the experimental section of the site ². Google Labs is a website demonstrating new Google projects that arent quite ready for prime time. It serves as a testing ground for new services being developed. ...

The name "Google"

Etymology

The name "Google" is an accidental misspelling of the word googol, which was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by a hundred zeros, 10¹⁰⁰. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web. Look up googol in Wiktionary, the free dictionary A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. ... 1938 was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Milton Sirotta (born c. ... A mathematician is a person whose area of study and research is mathematics. ... Edward Kasner (1878 - 1955) was an American mathematician. ...

Trademark and domain names

"To google," as a verb, has come to mean "to search for something on Google"; because of Google's popularity (in January 2005, 52 percent of all web searches ³ , but was as high as 80 percent) it has also generically come to mean "to search the web." Google officials have discouraged this usage of the company's name out of fear of trademark dilution, as it could lead to their name becoming a genericized trademark. The word google was first used in the 1927 Little Rascals silent film Dog Heaven, used to refer to a having a drink of water. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ... A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark)[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to set the business and its products or services apart from those of other businesses. ... Note: this page refers to dilution in the sense of trademark law. ... A genericized trademark (Commonwealth English genericised trade mark), sometimes known as a generic trade mark, generic descriptor or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name which has become synonymous with the general or formal term for a particular type of product or service, to the extent that it often...

To prevent domain hijacking by unaffiliated third parties, Google has purchased the redirecting rights to several similar-sounding domain names like gogle.com, googel.com, etc. See external links below for other domain names owned by Google. The registration of other domain names to prevent hijacking and for humorous purposes is by no means restricted to Google. Domain hijacking is the process by which internet domains that have expired are claimed by another owner and then used for some other purpose. ... The Domain Name System or DNS is a system that stores information about host names and domain names in a kind of distributed database on networks, such as the Internet. ...

The search engine

Index size

• ~ 1998: ~ 25,000,000
• August 2000: 1,060,000,000
• January 2002: 2,073,000,000
• February 2003: 3,083,000,000
• September 2004: 4,285,000,000
• November 2004: 8,058,044,651 web pages, 880,000,000 images, 845,000,000 Usenet messages, 4,500 news sources
• June 2005: 8,058,044,651 web pages, 1,187,630,000 images, 1 billion Usenet messages, 6,600 print catalogs, 4,500 news sources

(source: Internet Archive ⁴, GoogleBlog ⁵, Google Groups ⁶, Google Catalogs ⁷) 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ... Internet Archive headquarters, San Francisco The Internet Archive (archive. ... Googles main pages unusually spartan design, uncluttered appearance and quick loading time have contributed greatly to the sites mass appeal. ... Google offers a variety of services and tools besides its basic web search. ...

Physical structure

Google employs data centers full of computers running a custom Red Hat Linux in several locations around the world to respond to search requests and to index the web. The server farms in the data centers are built using a shared nothing architecture. The indexing is performed by a program named Googlebot, which periodically requests new copies of web pages it already knows about. The more often a page updates, the more often Googlebot will visit. The links in these pages are examined to discover new pages to be added to its internal database of the web. This index database and web page cache is several terabytes in size. Google has developed its own file system called Google File System for storing all this data. A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. ... Red Hat Linux is a Linux distribution, which was one of the most popular. ... A typical server farm. ... A shared nothing architecture is a distributed database architecture without a single point of failure. ... Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed database system custom developed by Google for their applications to use. ...

The exact size and whereabouts of the data centers Google uses for its search engine are unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Google's server farm computer cluster in the year 2000 consisted of approximately 6000 processors, 12000 common IDE disks (2 per machine, and one processor per machine), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley, California and two in Virginia. Each site had an OC 48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection and an OC 12 (622 Mbit/s) connections to other Google sites. The connections are eventually routed down to 4 x 1 Gbit/s lines connecting up to 64 racks, each rack holding 80 machines and two ethernet switches. Google has almost certainly dramatically changed and enlarged their network architecture since then. Linux Cluster at Purdue University A computer cluster is a group of loosely coupled computers that work together closely so that in many respects it can be viewed as though it were a single computer. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley. Like many large cities, San Joses downtown is expansive and encompasses much more area than shown in this view. ... State nickname: Old Dominion Other U.S. States Capital Richmond Largest city Virginia Beach Governor Mark R. Warner (D) Official languages English Area 110,862 km² (35th)  - Land 102,642 km²  - Water 8,220 km² (7. ...

Based on the Google IPO S-1 form released in April 2004, Tristan Louis, the Vice President of application development for the Internet unit of a large financial firm, estimated the current server farm to contain something like the following ⁸: Tristan Louis (born February 28, 1971) is an author, entrepreneur and blogger who has run the site TNL.net since 1994. ...

• 719 racks
• 63,272 machines
• 126,544 CPUs
• 253,088 GHz of processing power
• 126,544 GB of RAM
• 5,062 TB of hard drive space

According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. At 126-316 teraflops, it can perform at over one third the speed of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which is currently the most powerful computing machine available to humanity. A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... In computing, FLOPS is an abbreviation of FLoating point Operations Per Second. ... Blue Gene/L Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, and currently reaching speeds over 100 teraflops. ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Programming technology

Google use their own concept for distributing the task of processing collected data. Chunks from the Google File System of typically 64 MB are processed by the MapReduce framework. This framework makes it possible to apply the map and reduce concepts from functional programming languages across the data stored in the GFS. First a function is mapped across the collected data, then the result is reduced. For example a function extracting the hostname of the URL can be mapped across all pages, it is then sorted and reduced, yielding a figure of how many times a certain hostname has occurred. All mapping and reducing is massively parallelized across the nodes and fault tolerant, so if nodes crash or misbehave during map reduction, work is moved over to another machine. Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed database system custom developed by Google for their applications to use. ... Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. ... Massive parallelism is a term used in computer architecture and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design. ...

PageRank and indexing

Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists. Flowcharts are often used to represent algorithms. ... PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. ... Binomial name Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu (extinct) Homo sapiens sapiens Human beings define themselves in biological, social, and spiritual terms. ...

Google not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types ⁹, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and plain text files. Except in the case of text files, the cached version is a conversion to HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer application to read the file. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. ... Microsoft Word is a word processor program from Microsoft. ... Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and Apple Macintosh computers. ...

Google may have difficulty indexing some websites, in particular those that use frames, links embedded within JavaScript or Java, or complex URLs with more than six variables in the query string. Google offers an explanation why some web pages haven't been included ⁹.

Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language, use "SafeSearch" filtering technology (which is on 'moderate' setting by default), and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms over time. For any query (of which only the 32 first keywords are taken into account), up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page. A HTTP magic cookie (usually called simply a cookie) is a packet of information sent by a server to a World Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. ...

Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data in databases, which are accessible from websites by means of queries, but not by links. This so-called deep web is minimally covered by Google and contains, for example, catalogues of libraries, official legislative documents of governments, phone books, etc. The deep web (or invisible web or hidden web) is the name given to pages on the World Wide Web that are not indexed by conventional search engines. ... There are various forms of catalog or catalogue, each organized registers of some set of objects. ... Modern-style library In its traditional sense, a library is a collection of books and periodicals. ... A legislature is a governmental deliberative body with the power to adopt laws. ... In telephony, a telephone directory is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organisation that publishes the directory. ...

As an April Fool's parody of PageRank, Google introduced an explanation of something called "PigeonRank" ¹¹

Google optimization

The webpage that shows the results of a search for Miserable failure. This is an example of Google bombing.

Since Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters have become eager to influence their websites' Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites raise their rankings on Google and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings. Download high resolution version (902x589, 95 KB)This is a screen shot of the results that Google displays when the term Miserable failure is searched for on Google. ... Download high resolution version (902x589, 95 KB)This is a screen shot of the results that Google displays when the term Miserable failure is searched for on Google. ... The Google Page that shows the results of Miserable Failure. ... A screen shot of the results of searching for Miserable failure on Google. ... Webmaster or Webmistress is a commonly used term that refers to the person or persons responsible for a specific website. ... Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. ...

One of Google's chief challenges is that as its algorithms and results have gained the trust of web users, the profit to be gained by a commercial web site in subverting those results has increased dramatically. Some search engine optimization firms have attempted to inflate specific Google rankings by various artifices, and thereby draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Google has managed to weaken some of these attempts by reducing the ranking of sites known to use them.

Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and "off page" factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page," in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms.

One "off page" technique that works particularly well is Google bombing in which websites link to another site using a particular phrase in the anchor text, in order to give the site a high ranking when the word is searched for. A screen shot of the results of searching for Miserable failure on Google. ...

Google publishes a set of guidelines for a website's owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants ¹². The New Zealand DMA offers a more comprehensive guide to SEO ethics standards ¹³.

Services and tools

Main article: List of Google services and tools

Google offers a number of tools and services. Some, such as Google's calculator, stock quotes and weather results are integrated into what they call the "OneBox", meaning they appear in-line with other search results ¹⁴. The name is based on an ideal of all information being available from the one search box. Google offers a variety of services and tools besides its basic web search. ... A calculator is a device for performing numerical calculations. ...

Many of Google's other services are based on applying search technology to other sources of data. Examples of this are Google Image Search, Google News, and Google Video, as well as Froogle, their catalog searching service. However, many of these services have become integrated as OneBox results and now appear in normal search results as well as having their own pages. ¹⁵

Google also provides other related services that are not directly related to searching. These include their AdSense and AdWords targeted text advertising services, Gmail, Blogger web-logging service and Google Web Portal a beta web service similar to My Yahoo. AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. ... A Google promotional graphic, highlighting AdWords AdWords is Googles branded P4P advertising service. ... Gmail is a free webmail service, currently in beta testing, offered by Google, Inc. ... Blogger logo Blogger is a service created by Pyra Labs that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web. ...

Lastly, there are a number of tools written by Google to interact with their search and services. As of February 2005, these have been written exclusively for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Such tools include Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Gmail Notifier, Google Earth and Google Talk. 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and is the current year. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ... Known internally under the codename Puffin, Google Desktop Search enables desktop search. ... This article needs copyediting (checking for proper English spelling, grammar, usage, etc. ... Google Talk is an instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP service developed by Google. ...

Jargon

SEO 

Search Engine Optimization

To google 

to search something using google (also, to seek information on someone by entering their full name or other information)

Googler 

is a person who makes it easy to search the Google. Uses the google commands very efficiently. Uses the most of times "I am feeling lucky" button while searching. Fan of a google. 'Googler' is sometimes also used for "Expert Online Searcher". Also, a full-time google employee.

Noogler 

New Googler

Googlosophy 

The science of Google

Googlenym, Googlonym, Memomark, Google URL 

A mental bookmark expressed as Google search ("go to my site by entering 'John Doe Chicago' into Google"). A phrase or group of random key words for which a Google search returns a corresponding page.

SERPs 

Search Engine Result Pages

Nigritude ultramarine, SERPs, Seraphim Proudleduck, Mangeur de cigogne 

SEO competitions

Blackhat SEO 

search engine optimization using dirty tricks such as linkfarms, wiki or guestbook spamming, and so on

Googledork 

A person who accidentally exposes information to the web by placing it into a location spidered by Google.

Whitehat SEO 

search engine optimization using enhanced content, improved accessibility and usability, unique page titles, non-JavaScript linking methods, and so on

Google-proof 

search-phrase delivering exactly the intended result while searching with google

Sandbox Effect 

The name given to the phenomenon in which Google filters (from its results) websites created after March 2004.

Google bomb 

An attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Also known as Google wash.

Blue Red Yellow Blue Green Red 

synonym of Google (from the colors of their logo)

Nigritude ultramarine is a term made up by DarkBlue. ... A screen shot of the results of searching for Miserable failure on Google. ... A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. ... Google, Inc. ...

Books

• Google Hacks from O'Reilly is a book containing tips about using Google effectively. Now in its second edition. ISBN 0596008570
• Google: The Missing Manual by Sarah Milstein and Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly, 2004). ISBN 0596006136
• How to Do Everything with Google by Fritz Schneider, Nancy Blachman, and Eric Fredricksen (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2003). ISBN 0072231742
• Google Power by Chris Sherman (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2005). ISBN 0072257873

Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools (ISBN 0-596-00447-8) is a book of tips about Google, a popular Internet search engine, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. ... OReilly Media (formerly OReilly & Associates, IPA /əraɪli/) is an American media company established by Tim OReilly, primarily focusing on books related to computer programming. ...

See also

• Dennis Hwang
• elgooG
• Gmail
• Google Watch
• Googlewhack
• Peter Norvig
• List of search engines

Dennis Hwang, or Hwang Jung-moak is a graphic artist who designs the festive logos for Google on special days. ... elgooG is Google spelled backwards. ... Gmail is a free webmail service, currently in beta testing, offered by Google, Inc. ... Google Watch is a website run by Public Interest Research, started in 2001 by Daniel Brandt. ... A Googlewhack is a query consisting of two words (with no quote marks) entered into Googles search page that returns a single result. ... Peter Norvig is currently the Director of Search Quality at Google Inc. ... The following is a list of World Wide Web search engine services. ...

References

Note 1: Statistics Note 2: Personalized Google Search Note 3: International Herald Tribune article Note 4: Internet Archive copy of google.com ⁵http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/get-picture.html ⁶http://groups-beta.google.com/intl/en/googlegroups/about.html ⁷http://catalogs.google.com/ Note 8: How many Google machines Note 9: Filetypes FAQ Note 10: Exclusion of pages explanation Note 11: Pigeonrank explanation Note 12: guidelines Note 13: SEO ethics standards Note 14: OneBox Note 15: searchenginewatch.com article

External links

• Google website
• Google Services
• Google Language Tools
• Google doodles
• Early Google.com - Google as on November 11, 1998 from Internet Archive
• Open Directory Project: Google
• Original Stanford.edu Google - Google on Stanford.edu
• Overview of lawsuits against Google's AdWord program
• Google's Ads -- and Minuses
• An Evening with Google's Marissa Mayer - with several facts about Google's history
• Google Suggest for non-javascript browsers
• List of alternative Google domains (currently down for maintenance.)
• Official Google Weblog
• Google accepts submissions for websites that need indexing
• MapReduce article from Google Labs
• The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge - gives you the top 10 results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves, but whites out the name of the Search Engine returning the result. Instead it is possible to vote on a site's relevancy. Site will soon post the results of the experiment.