ResourcesThe seven wonders of the webThe Guardian OnlineHow have other firms succeeded when times are tough? Bill Clinton said last week that when he became president there were 50 websites. When he left there were 350m. So, instead of our usual review of the year, and on the tenth anniversary of the web, we offer... 1 Google Google is still to me - and millions of others - a daily miracle. If the internet only consisted of this ultra-fast search engine (Google) it would have justified its existence many times over. You can type in (almost) anything, however obscure, into the space provided and - literally - in a fraction of a second it has come up with hundreds, if not thousands, of references. If knowledge is power, then Google commands the gateway. It claims access to 3bn web documents - a total that is rising even as you read this. As a result of recent improvements, it can now search picture libraries and 20 years of usenet news groups. The ancient Library of Alexandria had 40,000 volumes - a fact uncovered, of course, through a Google search lasting 0.11 seconds. It is still all too easy to get blasé about what the web can do - witness the numbers of people who moan about having to wait seconds for getting information that 10 years ago would have taken days. Even so, Google stands apart from the hundreds of rival search engines that have sprouted across the web. It may be ousted, just as it saw off rival search engines such as AltaVista, but it can not get much faster than it is without becoming a super-charged Hawking engine searching in negative time. To see how Swimming Hippo Digital can help with search engine optimisation, click here. |
