Gaga over Google
By Connie Guglielmo and Charles Babcock
As the director of technology at search engine company Google, Craig Silverstein doesn't understand why Web sites don't put more into their search functions.
"It's frustrating to me to get a bad search, because we know it's possible to do a good search," he said. "I want to shake them and say, 'C'mon, why don't you get a good search engine?' "
One of the reasons companies don't invest more in search is because they are overconfident in the efficacy of the design of their sites, according to Silverstein.
"They think their site is so well-defined that people don't need to search because the navigation is so clear. Maybe they're so close to the site that they don't see the problems," he said. Google is notable for the relevance of its results, which are based on an analysis of a Web site's value by its Googlebot Web crawler. The Googlebot scores each page it finds by examining what sites link to the page.
"If high-quality sites point to you, then you're probably a high-quality site," Silverstein said.
By counting the links and evaluating their quality via the PageRank component of the Google engine, Google comes up with a rating for a given page and awards it a position higher on the list of results than pages that don't rank as well.
This ranking process gives Google an identifiable profile among the many search engines now available on the Web, according to Brian Cooper, author of the guidebook Searching the Internet. Google.com is not attempting to be a portal with many purposes and specialized links. Rather, it is a simple, straightforward search page offering a broad search or an "I Feel Lucky" button that takes the user to Google's best guess of where he or she most wishes to go.
The page-ranking system was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University, and they came up with the Lucky button based on their confidence in the search engine's ability to deliver results.
"Many times, it is uncannily accurate," Cooper said.
Silverstein said Google, like other search engines, is based on searching text on the Web, but the company is working on developing the ability to search audio and video files, as well as 3-D images.
Google was founded in 1998 and remains privately held. The Mountain View, Calif., company received $25 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
