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Google File System

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Google File System ( GFS or GoogleFS , not to be confused with the GFS Linux file system) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware . Google file system was replaced by Colossus in 2010.

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110-617: GFS is enhanced for Google's core data storage and usage needs (primarily the search engine ), which can generate enormous amounts of data that must be retained; Google File System grew out of an earlier Google effort, "BigFiles", developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the early days of Google, while it was still located in Stanford . Files are divided into fixed-size chunks of 64 megabytes , similar to clusters or sectors in regular file systems, which are only extremely rarely overwritten, or shrunk; files are usually appended to or read. It

220-515: A recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of other pages linking to them. PageRank is thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance. In addition to PageRank, Google, over the years, has added many other secret criteria for determining the ranking of resulting pages. This is reported to comprise over 250 different indicators, the specifics of which are kept secret to avoid difficulties created by scammers and help Google maintain an edge over its competitors globally. PageRank

330-517: A semantic search feature named Knowledge Graph . Analysis of the frequency of search terms may indicate economic, social and health trends. Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google can be openly inquired via Google Trends and have been shown to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels, and provide the information faster than traditional reporting methods and surveys. As of mid-2016, Google's search engine has begun to rely on deep neural networks . In August 2024,

440-684: A "Google Search" mobile app for Android and iOS devices. The mobile apps exclusively feature Google Discover and a "Collections" feature, in which the user can save for later perusal any type of search result like images, bookmarks or map locations into groups. Android devices were introduced to a preview of the feed, perceived as related to Google Now , in December 2016, while it was made official on both Android and iOS in July 2017. In April 2016, Google updated its Search app on Android to feature "Trends"; search queries gaining popularity appeared in

550-484: A 2007 interview with the Financial Times : "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take? ' ". Schmidt reaffirmed this during a 2010 interview with The Wall Street Journal : "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Because Google

660-519: A US judge in Virginia ruled that Google's search engine held an illegal monopoly over Internet search. The court found that Google mantained its market dominance by paying large amounts to phone-makers and browser-developers to make Google its default search engine. Google indexes hundreds of terabytes of information from web pages . For websites that are currently down or otherwise not available, Google provides links to cached versions of

770-623: A certain number of pages crawled, amount of data indexed, or time spent on the website, the spider stops crawling and moves on. "[N]o web crawler may actually crawl the entire reachable web. Due to infinite websites, spider traps, spam, and other exigencies of the real web, crawlers instead apply a crawl policy to determine when the crawling of a site should be deemed sufficient. Some websites are crawled exhaustively, while others are crawled only partially". Indexing means associating words and other definable tokens found on web pages to their domain names and HTML -based fields. The associations are made in

880-535: A crucial component of search engines through algorithms such as Hyper Search and PageRank . The first internet search engines predate the debut of the Web in December 1990: WHOIS user search dates back to 1982, and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files,

990-837: A disagreement with the government over censorship and a cyberattack. But Bing is in top three web search engine with a market share of 14.95%. Baidu is on top with 49.1% market share. Most countries' markets in the European Union are dominated by Google, except for the Czech Republic , where Seznam is a strong competitor. The search engine Qwant is based in Paris , France , where it attracts most of its 50 million monthly registered users from. Although search engines are programmed to rank websites based on some combination of their popularity and relevancy, empirical studies indicate various political, economic, and social biases in

1100-591: A great expanse of information, all at a single desk. He called it a memex . He described the system in an article titled " As We May Think " that was published in The Atlantic Monthly . The memex was intended to give a user the capability to overcome the ever-increasing difficulty of locating information in ever-growing centralized indices of scientific work. Vannevar Bush envisioned libraries of research with connected annotations, which are similar to modern hyperlinks . Link analysis eventually became

1210-447: A higher replication factor, while files for which the application client uses strict storage optimizations may be replicated less than three times - in order to cope with quick garbage cleaning policies. The Master server does not usually store the actual chunks, but rather all the metadata associated with the chunks, such as the tables mapping the 64-bit labels to chunk locations and the files they make up (mapping from files to chunks),

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1320-482: A keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine " Archie Search Engine " was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, " Veronica " and " Jughead " are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor. In

1430-440: A link to the search results using its proposed spelling), the ability to filter results to a date range, and many more. Google search accepts queries as normal text, as well as individual keywords. It automatically corrects apparent misspellings by default (while offering to use the original spelling as a selectable alternative), and provides the same results regardless of capitalization. For more customized results, one can use

1540-602: A major update in July 2017. Another major update was released in September 2018, which renamed the app from Google Feed to Google Discover, updated the design, and adding more features. Discover can be found on a tab in the Google app and by swiping left on the home screen of certain Android devices. As of 2019, Google will not allow political campaigns worldwide to target their advertisement to people to make them vote. At

1650-513: A minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal . In fact, the Google search engine became so popular that spoof engines emerged such as Mystery Seeker . By 2000, Yahoo! was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on

1760-416: A mobile-friendly interface would be ranked lower and it is expected that this update will cause a shake-up of ranks . Businesses who fail to update their websites accordingly could see a dip in their regular websites traffic. Google's rise was largely due to a patented algorithm called PageRank which helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it

1870-406: A page can be useful to the website when the actual page has been lost, but this problem is also considered a mild form of linkrot . Typically when a user enters a query into a search engine it is a few keywords . The index already has the names of the sites containing the keywords, and these are instantly obtained from the index. The real processing load is in generating the web pages that are

1980-646: A panic due to its potential threat to Google Search. Google added the ability to generate images in October. At I/O in 2024, the feature was upgraded and renamed AI Overviews. AI Overviews was rolled out to users in the United States in May 2024. The feature faced public criticism in the first weeks of its rollout after errors from the tool went viral online. These included results suggesting users add glue to pizza or eat rocks, or incorrectly claiming Barack Obama

2090-489: A preview text snippet for each result appears. Along with web search results, sections with images, news, and videos may appear. The length of the previewed text snipped was experimented with in 2015 and 2017. "Universal search" was launched by Google on May 16, 2007, as an idea that merged the results from different kinds of search types into one. Prior to Universal search, a standard Google search would consist of links only to websites. Universal search, however, incorporates

2200-417: A project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll continue to see more updates to our look and feel." The new navigation bar has been negatively received by a vocal minority. In November 2013, Google started testing yellow labels for advertisements displayed in search results, to improve user experience. The new labels, highlighted in yellow color, and aligned to

2310-408: A public database, made available for web search queries. A query from a user can be a single word, multiple words or a sentence. The index helps find information relating to the query as quickly as possible. Some of the techniques for indexing, and caching are trade secrets, whereas web crawling is a straightforward process of visiting all sites on a systematic basis. Between visits by the spider ,

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2420-475: A search engine to discover it, and to have a web site's record updated after a substantial redesign. Some search engine submission software not only submits websites to multiple search engines, but also adds links to websites from their own pages. This could appear helpful in increasing a website's ranking , because external links are one of the most important factors determining a website's ranking. However, John Mueller of Google has stated that this "can lead to

2530-464: A search function was added, allowing users to search Yahoo! Directory. It became one of the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than its full-text copies of web pages. Soon after, a number of search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan , Excite , Infoseek , Inktomi , Northern Light , and AltaVista . Information seekers could also browse

2640-473: A search provider, its engine is part of a distributed computing system that can encompass many data centers throughout the world. The speed and accuracy of an engine's response to a query is based on a complex system of indexing that is continuously updated by automated web crawlers . This can include data mining the files and databases stored on web servers , but some content is not accessible to crawlers. There have been many search engines since

2750-614: A search uses 30 times more energy than a conventional one. It has also been criticized for condensing information from various sources, making it less likely for people to view full articles and websites. When it was announced in May 2024, Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance was quoted as saying "This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content." In August 2024, AI Overviews were rolled out in

2860-624: A searchable database of file names; however, Archie Search Engine did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually. The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota ) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead . Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided

2970-491: A secondary, less up-to-date index for desktop use. The change was a response to the continued growth in mobile usage, and a push for web developers to adopt a mobile-friendly version of their websites. In December 2017, Google began rolling out the change, having already done so for multiple websites. In August 2009, Google invited web developers to test a new search architecture, codenamed "Caffeine", and give their feedback. The new architecture provided no visual differences in

3080-500: A system of time-limited, expiring "leases", where the Master server grants permission to a process for a finite period of time during which no other process will be granted permission by the Master server to modify the chunk. The modifying chunkserver, which is always the primary chunk holder, then propagates the changes to the chunkservers with the backup copies. The changes are not saved until all chunkservers acknowledge, thus guaranteeing

3190-402: A tremendous number of unnatural links for your site" with a negative impact on site ranking. In comparison to search engines, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders . All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand

3300-503: A variety of sources. This information is presented to users in a box to the right of search results. Knowledge Graph boxes were added to Google's search engine in May 2012, starting in the United States, with international expansion by the end of the year. The information covered by the Knowledge Graph grew significantly after launch, tripling its original size within seven months, and being able to answer "roughly one-third" of

3410-461: A website's homepage. The upgrade marked the most significant change to Google search in years, with more "human" search interactions and a much heavier focus on conversation and meaning. Thus, web developers and writers were encouraged to optimize their sites with natural writing rather than forced keywords, and make effective use of technical web development for on-site navigation. In 2023, drawing on internal Google documents disclosed as part of

Google File System - Misplaced Pages Continue

3520-773: A well-known public figure may trigger a Knowledge Panel displaying essential details such as biographical information, birthdate, and links to social media profiles or official websites. The primary objective of the Google Knowledge Panel is to provide users with immediate, factual answers, reducing the need for extensive navigation across multiple web pages. In May 2017, Google enabled a new "Personal" tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos . Google Discover, previously known as Google Feed,

3630-486: A wide variety of operators , including, but not limited to: Google also offers a Google Advanced Search page with a web interface to access the advanced features without needing to remember the special operators. Google applies query expansion to submitted search queries, using techniques to deliver results that it considers "smarter" than the query users actually submitted. This technique involves several steps, including: Search engine A search engine

3740-547: A wide variety of sources, including websites, news, pictures, maps, blogs, videos, and more, all shown on the same search results page. Marissa Mayer , then-vice president of search products and user experience, described the goal of Universal search as "we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results. In June 2017, Google expanded its search results to cover available job listings. The data

3850-487: Is "tailor-made for the millions of people in [India and Indonesia] coming online for the first time". Google Search consists of a series of localized websites . The largest of those, the google.com site , is the top most-visited website in the world. Some of its features include a definition link for most searches including dictionary words, the number of results you got on your search, links to other searches (e.g. for words that Google believes to be misspelled, it provides

3960-424: Is Muslim. Google described these viral errors as "isolated examples", maintaining that most AI Overviews provide accurate information. Two weeks after the rollout of AI Overviews, Google made technical changes and scaled back the feature, pausing its use for some health-related queries and limiting its reliance on social media posts. Scientific American has criticised the system on environmental grounds, as such

4070-541: Is a search engine operated by Google . It allows users to search for information on the Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide. Google Search is the most-visited website in the world . As of 2020, Google Search has a 92% share of the global search engine market. Approximately 26.75% of Google's monthly global traffic comes from

4180-431: Is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query . The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app , and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news. For

4290-584: Is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other news-related content. The feed contains a "mix of cards" which show topics of interest based on users' interactions with Google, or topics they choose to follow directly. Cards include, "links to news stories, YouTube videos, sports scores, recipes, and other content based on what [Google] determined you're most likely to be interested in at that particular moment." Users can also tell Google they're not interested in certain topics to avoid seeing future updates. Google Discover launched in December 2016 and received

4400-482: Is a system that generates an " inverted index " by analyzing texts it locates. This first form relies much more heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work. Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and thus some of them allow advertisers to have their listings ranked higher in search results for a fee. Search engines that do not accept money for their search results make money by running search related ads alongside

4510-562: Is aggregated from various major job boards and collected by analyzing company homepages. Initially only available in English, the feature aims to simplify finding jobs suitable for each user. In May 2009, Google announced that they would be parsing website microformats to populate search result pages with "Rich snippets". Such snippets include additional details about results, such as displaying reviews for restaurants and social media accounts for individuals. In May 2016, Google expanded on

Google File System - Misplaced Pages Continue

4620-490: Is also designed and optimized to run on Google's computing clusters, dense nodes which consist of cheap "commodity" computers, which means precautions must be taken against the high failure rate of individual nodes and the subsequent data loss. Other design decisions select for high data throughputs , even when it comes at the cost of latency . A GFS cluster consists of multiple nodes. These nodes are divided into two types: one Master node and multiple Chunkservers . Each file

4730-443: Is because misinformation can affect users financially, physically, or emotionally. Therefore, the update targeted particularly those YMYL pages that have low-quality content and misinformation. This resulted in the algorithm targeting health and medical-related websites more than others. However, many other websites from other industries were also negatively affected. By 2012, it handled more than 3.5 billion searches per day. In 2013

4840-588: Is by far the world's most used search engine, with a market share of 90.6%, and the world's other most used search engines were Bing , Yahoo! , Baidu , Yandex , and DuckDuckGo . In 2024, Google's dominance was ruled an illegal monopoly in a case brought by the US Department of Justice. In Russia, Yandex has a market share of 62.6%, compared to Google's 28.3%. And Yandex is the second most used search engine on smartphones in Asia and Europe. In China, Baidu

4950-404: Is divided into fixed-size chunks. Chunkservers store these chunks. Each chunk is assigned a globally unique 64-bit label by the master node at the time of creation, and logical mappings of files to constituent chunks are maintained. Each chunk is replicated several times throughout the network. At default, it is replicated three times, but this is configurable. Files which are in high demand may have

5060-475: Is illegal. Biases can also be a result of social processes, as search engine algorithms are frequently designed to exclude non-normative viewpoints in favor of more "popular" results. Indexing algorithms of major search engines skew towards coverage of U.S.-based sites, rather than websites from non-U.S. countries. Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons. Several scholars have studied

5170-536: Is little evidence for the filter bubble. On the contrary, a number of studies trying to verify the existence of filter bubbles have found only minor levels of personalisation in search, that most people encounter a range of views when browsing online, and that Google news tends to promote mainstream established news outlets. The global growth of the Internet and electronic media in the Arab and Muslim world during

5280-410: Is not implemented in the kernel of an operating system , but is instead provided as a userspace library. The Google File System does not provide a POSIX interface. Files are organized hierarchically in directories and identified by pathnames. The file operations such as create, delete, open, close, read, write are supported. It supports Record Append which allows multiple clients to append data to

5390-425: Is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web , inaccessible through its search tools. In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy . In October 2016, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, announced that the search engine would be making a separate, primary web index dedicated for mobile devices, with

5500-709: Is that search engines and social media platforms use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see, based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history). As a result, websites tend to show only information that agrees with the user's past viewpoint. According to Eli Pariser users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Since this problem has been identified, competing search engines have emerged that seek to avoid this problem by not tracking or "bubbling" users, such as DuckDuckGo . However many scholars have questioned Pariser's view, finding that there

5610-663: Is the most popular search engine , many webmasters attempt to influence their website's Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites increase their rankings on Google and other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings to draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title elements, H1 heading elements and image alt attribute values) and Off Page Optimization factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea

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5720-538: Is the most popular search engine. South Korea's homegrown search portal, Naver , is used for 62.8% of online searches in the country. Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Taiwan are the most popular avenues for Internet searches in Japan and Taiwan, respectively. China is one of few countries where Google is not in the top three web search engines for market share. Google was previously a top search engine in China, but withdrew after

5830-509: Is the opinion of the owner of one business about which there have been numerous complaints, that negative publicity, for example, numerous consumer complaints, may serve as well to elevate page rank on Google Search as favorable comments. The particular problem addressed in The New York Times article, which involved DecorMyEyes , was addressed shortly thereafter by an undisclosed fix in the Google algorithm. According to Google, it

5940-563: Is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page", in particular the title element and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, presumably the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms. Google has published guidelines for website owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants. It has been hypothesized, and, allegedly,

6050-468: Is to search for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers, as opposed to other data, such as images or data contained in databases . It was originally developed in 1996 by Larry Page , Sergey Brin , and Scott Hassan . The search engine would also be set up in the garage of Susan Wojcicki 's Menlo Park home. In 2011, Google introduced " Google Voice Search " to search for spoken, rather than typed, words. In 2012, Google introduced

6160-620: The Baidu search engine, which was founded by him in China and launched in 2000. In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal as the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser. There was so much interest that instead, Netscape struck deals with five of the major search engines: for $ 5 million a year, each search engine would be in rotation on the Netscape search engine page. The five engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite. Google adopted

6270-496: The European Commission found that Google Search favored Google's own products, instead of the best result for consumers' needs. In February 2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would favor mobile friendly over other websites . Nearly 60% of Google searches come from mobile phones. Google says it wants users to have access to premium quality websites . Those websites which lack

6380-768: The United States , 4.44% from India , 4.4% from Brazil , 3.92% from the United Kingdom and 3.84% from Japan according to data provided by Similarweb . The order of search results returned by Google is based, in part, on a priority rank system called " PageRank ". Google Search also provides many different options for customized searches, using symbols to include, exclude, specify or require certain search behavior, and offers specialized interactive experiences, such as flight status and package tracking, weather forecasts, currency, unit, and time conversions, word definitions, and more. The main purpose of Google Search

6490-400: The United States v. Google LLC (2020) antitrust case, technology reporters claimed that Google Search was "bloated and overmonetized" and that the "semantic matching" of search queries put advertising profits before quality. Wired withdrew Megan Gray's piece after Google complained about alleged inaccuracies, while the author reiterated that «As stated in court, "A goal of Project Mercury

6600-411: The cached version of the page (some or all the content needed to render it) stored in the search engine working memory is quickly sent to an inquirer. If a visit is overdue, the search engine can just act as a web proxy instead. In this case, the page may differ from the search terms indexed. The cached page holds the appearance of the version whose words were previously indexed, so a cached version of

6710-464: The "Rich snippets" format to offer "Rich cards", which, similarly to snippets, display more information about results, but shows them at the top of the mobile website in a swipeable carousel-like format. Originally limited to movie and recipe websites in the United States only, the feature expanded to all countries globally in 2017. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's results with information gathered from

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6820-541: The 100 billion monthly searches Google processed in May 2016. The information is often used as a spoken answer in Google Assistant and Google Home searches. The Knowledge Graph has been criticized for providing answers without source attribution. A Google Knowledge Panel is a feature integrated into Google search engine result pages, designed to present a structured overview of entities such as individuals, organizations, locations, or objects directly within

6930-410: The 2023 Google I/O event in May, Google unveiled Search Generative Experience (SGE), an experimental feature in Google Search available through Google Labs which produces AI-generated summaries in response to search prompts. This was part of Google's wider efforts to counter the unprecedented rise of generative AI technology, ushered by OpenAI 's launch of ChatGPT , which sent Google executives to

7040-405: The Internet without assistance. They can either submit one web page at a time, or they can submit the entire site using a sitemap , but it is normally only necessary to submit the home page of a web site as search engines are able to crawl a well designed website. There are two remaining reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine: to add an entirely new web site without waiting for

7150-506: The Jewish version of Google, and Christian search engine SeekFind.org. SeekFind filters sites that attack or degrade their faith. Web search engine submission is a process in which a webmaster submits a website directly to a search engine. While search engine submission is sometimes presented as a way to promote a website, it generally is not necessary because the major search engines use web crawlers that will eventually find most web sites on

7260-584: The UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, with local language support. On October 28, 2024, AI Overviews was rolled out to 100 more countries, including Australia and New Zealand. In late June 2011, Google introduced a new look to the Google homepage in order to boost the use of the Google+ social tools. One of the major changes was replacing the classic navigation bar with a black one. Google's digital creative director Chris Wiggins explains: "We're working on

7370-596: The autocomplete box along with normal query autocompletion. The update received significant backlash, due to encouraging search queries unrelated to users' interests or intentions, prompting the company to issue an update with an opt-out option. In September 2017, the Google Search app on iOS was updated to feature the same functionality. In December 2017, Google released "Google Go", an app designed to enable use of Google Search on physically smaller and lower-spec devices in multiple languages. A Google blog post about designing "India-first" products and features explains that it

7480-504: The collections from Google and Bing (and others). While lack of investment and slow pace in technologies in the Muslim world has hindered progress and thwarted success of an Islamic search engine, targeting as the main consumers Islamic adherents, projects like Muxlim (a Muslim lifestyle site) received millions of dollars from investors like Rite Internet Ventures, and it also faltered. Other religion-oriented search engines are Jewogle,

7590-487: The combined technologies of its acquisitions. Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, the site began to display listings from Looksmart , blended with results from Inktomi. For a short time in 1999, MSN Search used results from AltaVista instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot ). Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing ,

7700-509: The company's distributed database platform. In August 2018, Danny Sullivan from Google announced a broad core algorithm update. As per current analysis done by the industry leaders Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, the update was to drop down the medical and health-related websites that were not user friendly and were not providing good user experience. This is why the industry experts named it "Medic". Google reserves very high standards for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages. This

7810-432: The completion and atomicity of the operation. Programs access the chunks by first querying the Master server for the locations of the desired chunks; if the chunks are not being operated on (i.e. no outstanding leases exist), the Master replies with the locations, and the program then contacts and receives the data from the chunkserver directly (similar to Kazaa and its supernodes ). Unlike most other file systems, GFS

7920-454: The content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning and quality of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end-users than systems that rank resources based on

8030-512: The cultural changes triggered by search engines, and the representation of certain controversial topics in their results, such as terrorism in Ireland , climate change denial , and conspiracy theories . There has been concern raised that search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history, leading to what has been termed echo chambers or filter bubbles by Eli Pariser in 2011. The argument

8140-412: The dawn of the Web in the 1990s, but Google Search became the dominant one in the 2000s and has remained so. It currently has a 91% global market share. The business of websites improving their visibility in search results , known as marketing and optimization , has thus largely focused on Google. In 1945, Vannevar Bush described an information retrieval system that would allow a user to access

8250-560: The desired date range. It is also possible to weight by date because each page has a modification time. Most search engines support the use of the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to help end users refine the search query . Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search , which allows users to define

8360-629: The directory instead of doing a keyword-based search. In 1996, Robin Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating the very similar algorithm patent filed by Google two years later in 1998. Larry Page referenced Li's work in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank. Li later used his Rankdex technology for

8470-480: The distance between keywords. There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank

8580-438: The existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. JumpStation (created in December 1993 by Jonathon Fletcher ) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of

8690-402: The idea of selling search terms in 1998 from a small search engine company named goto.com . This move had a significant effect on the search engine business, which went from struggling to one of the most profitable businesses in the Internet. Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several companies entered

8800-528: The information they provide and the underlying assumptions about the technology. These biases can be a direct result of economic and commercial processes (e.g., companies that advertise with a search engine can become also more popular in its organic search results), and political processes (e.g., the removal of search results to comply with local laws). For example, Google will not surface certain neo-Nazi websites in France and Germany, where Holocaust denial

8910-561: The last decade has encouraged Islamic adherents in the Middle East and Asian sub-continent , to attempt their own search engines, their own filtered search portals that would enable users to perform safe searches . More than usual safe search filters, these Islamic web portals categorizing websites into being either " halal " or " haram ", based on interpretation of Sharia law . ImHalal came online in September 2011. Halalgoogling came online in July 2013. These use haram filters on

9020-411: The left of each sponsored link help users differentiate between organic and sponsored results. On December 15, 2016, Google rolled out a new desktop search interface that mimics their modular mobile user interface. The mobile design consists of a tabular design that highlights search features in boxes. and works by imitating the desktop Knowledge Graph real estate, which appears in the right-hand rail of

9130-435: The limited resources available on the platform it ran on, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered. One of the first "all text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler , which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it allowed users to search for any word in any web page , which has become the standard for all major search engines since. It

9240-491: The locations of the copies of the chunks, what processes are reading or writing to a particular chunk, or taking a "snapshot" of the chunk pursuant to replicate it (usually at the instigation of the Master server, when, due to node failures, the number of copies of a chunk has fallen beneath the set number). All this metadata is kept current by the Master server periodically receiving updates from each chunk server ("Heart-beat messages"). Permissions for modifications are handled by

9350-541: The market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings . Some have taken down their public search engine and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble , a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in March 2000. Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence. The company achieved better results for many searches with an algorithm called PageRank , as

9460-496: The master node is not directly involved in data reading (the data are passed from the chunk server directly to the reading client), the read rate increases significantly with the number of chunk servers, achieving 583 MB/s for 342 nodes. Aggregating multiple servers also allows big capacity, while it is somewhat reduced by storing data in three independent locations (to provide redundancy). Google (search engine) Google Search (also known simply as Google or Google.com )

9570-473: The number of external links pointing to it. However, both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, (see Gaming the system ), and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this. The first web search engine was Archie , created in 1990 by Alan Emtage , a student at McGill University in Montreal. The author originally wanted to call the program "archives", but had to shorten it to comply with

9680-401: The regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads. Local search is the process that optimizes the efforts of local businesses. They focus on change to make sure all searches are consistent. It is important because many people determine where they plan to go and what to buy based on their searches. As of January 2022, Google

9790-465: The results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve. There are two main types of search engine that have evolved: one is a system of predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords that humans have programmed extensively. The other

9900-416: The same file concurrently and atomicity is guaranteed. Deciding from benchmarking results, when used with relatively small number of servers (15), the file system achieves reading performance comparable to that of a single disk (80–100 MB/s), but has a reduced write performance (30 MB/s), and is relatively slow (5 MB/s) in appending data to existing files. The authors present no results on random seek time. As

10010-478: The search engine result page, these featured elements frequently feature Twitter carousels, People Also Search For, and Top Stories (vertical and horizontal design) modules. The Local Pack and Answer Box were two of the original features of the Google SERP that were primarily showcased in this manner, but this new layout creates a previously unseen level of design consistency for Google results. Google offers

10120-458: The search interface. This feature leverages data from Google's Knowledge Graph, a database that organizes and interconnects information about entities, enhancing the retrieval and presentation of relevant content to users. The content within a Knowledge Panel is derived from various sources, including Misplaced Pages and other structured databases, ensuring that the information displayed is both accurate and contextually relevant. For instance, querying

10230-542: The search results list: Every page in the entire list must be weighted according to information in the indexes. Then the top search result item requires the lookup, reconstruction, and markup of the snippets showing the context of the keywords matched. These are only part of the processing each search results web page requires, and further pages (next to the top) require more of this post-processing. Beyond simple keyword lookups, search engines offer their own GUI - or command-driven operators and search parameters to refine

10340-428: The search results. These provide the necessary controls for the user engaged in the feedback loop users create by filtering and weighting while refining the search results, given the initial pages of the first search results. For example, from 2007 the Google.com search engine has allowed one to filter by date by clicking "Show search tools" in the leftmost column of the initial search results page, and then selecting

10450-559: The site, formed by the search engine's latest indexing of that page. Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs , Word documents , Excel spreadsheets , PowerPoint presentations , certain Flash multimedia content , and plain text files. Users can also activate " SafeSearch ", a filtering technology aimed at preventing explicit and pornographic content from appearing in search results. Despite Google search's immense index, sources generally assume that Google

10560-419: The speed and accuracy of the hummingbird . The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. "Hummingbird" places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords. It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just

10670-507: The standard filename robots.txt , addressed to it. The robots.txt file contains directives for search spiders, telling it which pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. After checking for robots.txt and either finding it or not, the spider sends certain information back to be indexed depending on many factors, such as the titles, page content, JavaScript , Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), headings, or its metadata in HTML meta tags . After

10780-452: The summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogs were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog , the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT , produced what

10890-538: The title "What's New!". The first tool used for searching content (as opposed to users) on the Internet was Archie . The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created by Alan Emtage , computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec , Canada. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP ( File Transfer Protocol ) sites, creating

11000-600: The user interface, but added significant speed improvements and a new "under-the-hood" indexing infrastructure. The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft 's recent release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing , as well as the launch of Wolfram Alpha , a new search engine based on "computational knowledge". Google announced completion of "Caffeine" on June 8, 2010, claiming 50% fresher results due to continuous updating of its index. With "Caffeine", Google moved its back-end indexing system away from MapReduce and onto Bigtable ,

11110-495: The way the company showed favoritism to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying €2.4 billion. The EU Court of Justice referred to Google's treatment of rival shopping searches as "discriminatory" and in violation of the Digital Markets Act . At the top of the search page, the approximate result count and the response time two digits behind decimal is noted. Of search results, page titles and URLs, dates, and

11220-573: Was Archie , which debuted on 10 September 1990. Prior to September 1993, the World Wide Web was entirely indexed by hand. There was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver . One snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, but as more and more web servers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under

11330-458: Was also the search engine that was widely known by the public. Also, in 1994, Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University ) was launched and became a major commercial endeavor. The first popular search engine on the Web was Yahoo! Search . The first product from Yahoo! , founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994, was a Web directory called Yahoo! Directory . In 1995,

11440-446: Was explained in the paper Anatomy of a Search Engine written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page , the later founders of Google. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Larry Page's patent for PageRank cites Robin Li 's earlier RankDex patent as an influence. Google also maintained

11550-478: Was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex , developed by Robin Li in 1996. Larry Page's patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li's earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2000. In a potential hint of Google's future direction of their Search algorithm, Google's then chief executive Eric Schmidt , said in

11660-478: Was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in which Yahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology. As of 2019, active search engine crawlers include those of Google, Sogou , Baidu, Bing, Gigablast , Mojeek , DuckDuckGo and Yandex . A search engine maintains the following processes in near real time: Web search engines get their information by web crawling from site to site. The "spider" checks for

11770-520: Was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance. Other keyword-based methods to rank search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would check how often the search terms occurred in a page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. The PageRank algorithm instead analyzes human-generated links assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are also important. The algorithm computes

11880-405: Was not the frequently published consumer complaints about DecorMyEyes which resulted in the high ranking but mentions on news websites of events which affected the firm such as legal actions against it. Google Search Console helps to check for websites that use duplicate or copyright content. In 2013, Google significantly upgraded its search algorithm with "Hummingbird". Its name was derived from

11990-631: Was probably the first web robot , the Perl -based World Wide Web Wanderer , and used it to generate an index called "Wandex". The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot , but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of

12100-484: Was to increase commercial queries"». In March 2024, Google announced a significant update to its core search algorithm and spam targeting, which is expected to wipe out 40 percent of all spam results. On March 20th, it was confirmed that the roll out of the spam update was complete. On September 10, 2024, the European-based EU Court of Justice found that Google held an illegal monopoly with

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