Google is 9: A tribute

By Daniel Makundi
--
Time does fly: it's not that long ago when I
was telling my computer class that the
leading search engine is Alta Vista (at that
time with a strangely cumbersome url.
"altavista.digital.com"

In those days there were multiple popular search
engines, such as lycos, infoseek, dogpile,
metacrawler etc etc., the latter being crawlers
of search engines.

Then came a phenomenon, a search engine with
a strange name, google, whose logo was
coloured like child picturebook of letters.
The UI was straightforward, no-nonsense: just
a text box and a submit button and, yes, the
"I'm feeling lucky" button.

Google? what kind of name? Looking into a
dictionary there is "googly" describing a
cricket ball shot intended to take a surprise
trajectory (I wonder if the google inventors
did know that this would be exactly what
Google would do to competitors!). I read
somewhere that the name could be related to
the word "googol" which is a very large
number: 10000...000 where total number of
zeros is one hundred. Could they have known
that their company would sometime reach fantanstic
heights?

The speed of fetching results became
immediately noticeable with this search
engine. Web pundits were then remarking that
it didn't have that many websites crawled, so
yahoo and altavista would likely fetch more
relevant results.

Little did we know, then, that the Google was
conceived by Stanford PhD students Serge Brin
and Larry Page--I did come across this fact
much later when some kind soul posted an
article about Internet repository, digging
out personal webpages of that time's
students. There it was, talk about use of
eigenvectors (complex branch of math we
study in the second year at UDSM) in search
engine routines and stuff, to produce the fastest
search engine listing results with such well-sorted order
by relevance that you'd think the computers were
actually very intellingent. There were gizmos too, thrown
in without as much as a hype. Such as:
- /Did you mean so-and-so?/
or
- [translate this page]
or
- [view as html].

Then came gmail, a free webmail that had a
way of grouping messages into conversations.
That would grab a handful of attachments, zip
them and download a package onto your machine
pronto. They are the ones who brought about
the stampede of gigangic free email space when
they started offering a one gigabyte storage space.
Many people never believed for once such thing
could be realized. Now not only that it came
to be possible, but other free webmails have
copied the thing too. Walla! is offering 5
gigabyte, hotmail which was the first in and
biggest dissapointer with its 2 megabyte
limit, unzipped their space to also give a
gigabyte. Heck, Yahoo has recently said there
wouldn't be storage limit any longer--someone in this
world of queers is bound to throw a monkey
wrench into works by sending himself 10 giga
of stuff to test the system resilience--tch tch.

Google has so many goodies that have worked
so much for me that I wonder if Google are
not angels in disguise:
- Picasa is the best picture manager
- Google earth (travelling the globe like a
bird would soar among trees and getting as
much excitement)
- Google Desktop to fetch that obscure
document from deep crevices of the hard disk
pronto just like its web sibling
- Google Patents
- Google Print
- Googlepages
- YouTube
- Instant messenger within gmail
- etc.
Sometime not long ago Google decided to go
public in style--auctioning their shares.
Work, the idea did, and turned the founding partners
into overnight billionaires. And the shares kept
performing beyond any imagination in the market.
Serge and Larry are now in the Forbes top ten richest
billionaires, with clean-shaven jaw and not
an inch of fat. It's not at all difficult for
me to understand this--see my archive for a
post i made on GENIUSES.

And all this thanks to the non-intrusive ads.

Google even let me try some business by
placing adsense links on some of my pages and
blog. I haven't made money yet, but I only
have myself to blame for not making the
webpages more attractive.
As if all that good was not enough,

Google.org was established as a philantropic
side of Google: some projects have already
been funded for the good of mankind.
The latest we see in the news about Google
gig is that of offering millions of dollars
for private developer of vehicle to go to the
moon!

I do break down in cold sweat imagining (on behalf of
thousands who have got to make Google their
everyday part of life) what would happen if
Google shuts down? I do pray that day will
not come to pass. I wish all at Google good
health, long life and sustainability.