Google is a search engine owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to
"organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful". The largest search engine on the web, Google receives over 200 million
queries each day through its various services.
Google not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types,
which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text
files, among others. Except in the case of text and SWF files, the cached
version is a conversion to HTML, allowing those without the corresponding viewer
application to read the file.
Users can customize the search engine somewhat. They can set a default language,
use "SafeSearch" filtering technology (which is on 'moderate' setting by
default), and set the number of results shown on each page. Google has been
criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these
preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms
over time. For any query (of which only the 32 first keywords are taken into
account), up to the first 1000 results can be shown with a maximum of 100
displayed per page. |
|
|
