Google

Google is a company whose primary business is Internet-based services, including an extremely popular search engine.

Google is associated with liberal causes and has been criticized for catering to communist China in censoring information from the people as requested by dictators:

Reporters Without Borders joined others in asking how Google could stand up for US users' freedoms while controlling what Chinese users can search for. Its previous search engine for China's fast-growing market was subject to government blocks. The new site - Google.cn - censors itself to satisfy Beijing. While cooperating with China's govenment, Google refuses to fulfill requests by the U.S. Department of Justice. Google counsel Nicole Wong said "..we intend to resist their motion vigorously."

Google has also been accused of delisting conservative news sites from its search engine. As one of many examples, "In February 2005, Michelle Malkin wrote of the difficulties she was having becoming part of Google News."

Much of Google's business depends on pornography. For example, 25% of search engine requests are for pornography.

Corporate Information

The CEO of Google since 2001 is Eric Schmidt. Google is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Google was founded on September 7th, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Since then, it has grown to be the largest internet search engine in the world. According to Alexa Internet, over 25% of all Internet users visit Google monthly. Google also owns YouTube, the homemade video clip site. Viacom is suing YouTube, and thus Google, for a reported $1 billion, arguing that the economic model of YouTube is based on copyright infringement.

History

Google's logo on Earth day, April 22, 2007.

Founding

Google was originally a research project, started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, when the two attended Stanford University. The two registered the domain name google.stanford.edu, and the small search engine went online for the first time.

Google bombing

Perhaps the most innovative contribution Google has made to internet searching is its PageRank algorithm. This system works by counting the number of sites that link to another site; the more links pointing to a page, the higher that page will be ranked. The engine also takes note of how often the page is updated. Due to this, Wikipedia is consistently ranked very highly by Google, due to its constant updating and heavy linkage. More recently, internet-savvy Googlers have discovered ways to game the system; creating massive numbers of pages with links pointing to one page to form what is known as a "Google Bomb". Some examples can be found below.

• "Miserable Failure": For nearly two years, searching "miserable failure" (or even just "miserable", or "failure") in the Google search engine would return the White House Biography of George W. Bush. This was orchestrated by Democratic Party supporters in late 2003, as part of the 2004 Presidential election. However, at times, Conservative supporters were able to shift the phrase to Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore.
• '"Great President": returns the White House Biography of George W. Bush.
• "Waffles": Also as part of the 2004 Presidential election, Conservative supporters managed to link the term "waffles" to the official website of John Kerry.
• "French Military Victories": Hitting "I'm Feeling Lucky" for this term directs you to a fake Google page (in reality, it is an AlbinoBlackSheep.com page, styled to look exactly like a Google page, here) giving no matches, and asking if you meant "French military defeats?".
• "Weapons of Mass Destruction" would bring up a similar page with the error message 'not found.'

On January 25, 2007, Google claimed to have modified their PageRank algorithm to lessen the likelihood of future Google bombs

Privacy Concerns

Google has been criticized by privacy activists and others. Recently, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said, "We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion." Google has attempted to "remedy" this situation by storing search information, in effect, keeping tabs on people for two years after they search. This has led Google critic Daniel Brandt to create "Scroogle", which runs Google searches that users conduct through his organization's personal servers to prevent Google from being able to connect any personal information to the searchers.