Computer programmer Jim Flanagan just may be Yahoo’s worst nightmare.
"’Do you Yahoo?’ No, I Google," he wrote last year in his online journal. "Looking for clues about the origins of words, the history of phrases, I google. I google for game cheats, and trouble shooting [sic] hints."
And now? "I can type 'google' faster than I can type my own last name," he says.
He’s not alone. From its inception in 1998, Google has grown from the project of two Stanford computer science grad students into the most popular search engine on the Web. Google answers over 150 million queries a day, both on its own site, and as the provider of search results for Yahoo and America Online (two of the Web's three most-trafficked destinations).
And as it grew, something happened. Google reached a tipping point -- a critical mass of popularity. People started using it in ways its creators never anticipated. It became something more than a search engine.
Google became a verb.
"Throw out your Merriam-Webster, throw out your Fowler and Follett — throw away your whole shelf of reference books, in fact," National Review columnist John Derbyshire crowed. "Why do I need this damn thick Oxford Classical Dictionary to tell me who Praxagoras of Cos was? I can google him faster than I can get the book down from my shelf."
Naturally, people also googled each other. Singles googled to check out prospective dates. Job-hunters googled potential employers. Classmates googled old friends.
In some ways this is nothing new. Early Web users "ego-surfed" the first search engines for their own names. Internet veterans "kibozed" Usenet newsgroups. The difference between Google and earlier search methods is that Google just works. ("Uncanny," one early reviewer called it.)
Older search engines may have covered hundreds of millions of Web pages, but it seemed you had to dig through that many to get the results you were looking for. Google largely solved the problem of irrelevant results by letting the Internet community "vote" on the most relevant Web pages. Web pages that receive the most links from other pages get ranked the highest. The upshot? The closest thing yet to intuitive search.
Flanagan compared Google to the Segway scooter: "You think about where you want to go, and it goes there," he wrote.
When UC Berkeley student Nazanin Rafsanjani planned a trip to Minnesota recently, she googled a high-school classmate she hadn’t seen in years. Now they are planning a reunion. "I was surprised how easy it was," she said.
And while most people find Google useful to extract hidden nuggets of information, others are interested in Google for precisely the opposite reason. They are using Google’s more than 3 billion indexed web pages as a massive, world-wide poll of wired humanity.
Googlefight.com, for example, invites users to pit two keywords or phrases against one another -- say, "googled" vs. "yahooed." Googlefight runs a Google search on each keyword and tallies the results. Whichever search returns the most results wins the "fight." ("googled," with 13,000 results to "yahooed"'s 572.)
Googlefight is just for fun, but Tomasz P. Szynalski, Polish webmaster of the English-language learning Web site Antimoon.com, uses the same principle to correct his English grammar. For example, to decide whether to use "different than" and "different from," he tested both phrases on Google. Since both phrases turned up more than a million results, he decided that both were valid.
"Google is better than grammar books, because the results show REAL contemporary language, not the opinions of grammarians," he wrote.
Similarly, some are finding it easier to correct their spelling with Google than to reach for a dictionary. Google’s spell-checker automatically checks the spelling of all queries entered into it. If it detects a likely misspelling, it suggests an alternate.
Google won’t comment on the technical details of its spell-checker, but will say that it doesn’t rely on a dictionary. Instead, it is "based on occurrences of all words on the Internet." In other words, Google decides the proper spelling of a word much the same way it ranks Web pages: by tallying the votes of the Web community.
Paolo Valdemarin, CEO of evectors, said that for this reason he found the spell-check especially useful for proper names, which do not appear in dictionaries.
Other, more purely recreational uses of Google also rely on the search engine’s awesome reach.
The game of "googlewhacking," for example, enjoyed a brief heyday earlier this year. The rules are simple: try to find two dictionary-approved keywords that call up only one Google result. It sounds easy. It isn’t. Successful googlewhacks have included such unlikely combinations as "tandoori hemlines" and "cacophonous impounding.")
Another site, Googlism, invites users to "find out what Google thinks of you, your friends, or anything." Enter a keyword, and Googlism trolls Google's results to get the web community's "opinion" of any subject.
So, according to Googlism, Saddam Hussein is "ripe for fall," "a serious threat," and "a despicable human being"; similarly, George W. Bush is "an illegitimate president," "definitely not Bill Clinton," and "one frightening man."
Writer Steven Johnson, who admits an "obsession" with Google, recently suggested the concept of "googleshare." First search Google on a word like "Emergence" (the title of Johnson’s last book). Then search within those results for your name. Divide the second number of results by the first, and you get your Googleshare of that word.
"Call it semantic mindshare. Or lexical penetration. Or whatever," Johnson wrote.
Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin seems surprised at what he has made. Asked at a recent technology conference if he was concerned that the world is rearranging itself around Google, Brin, in the words of one attendee, "looked flummoxed."
Google, Brin reportedly said a bit earlier in the talk, is simply the search engine he and Larry Page built at Stanford, with some hacks added by Google engineers.
Strangely, he seems not to have thought to refer to Googlism, which would have had this to say on the subject: "Google is your friend…Google is so cool…Google is thinking."
