How Many Search Engines do We Really Need? - Google: the Goliath of the search engine world
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Google is one of the largest search engines ever created, indexing billions of Web pages. Still, size isn't everything. In fact, it's counterproductive if your searches give you thousands of hits that mostly do not seem relevant to the topic for which you are searching.
Fortunately, Google's excellent search algorithm retrieves an unusually high level of relevant results. Its system ranks every website's importance based on the number of sites that are linked to the site itself plus the importance (as rated by Google) of these sites. In the vast majority of searches, this system seems to return the most high-quality, relevant Web pages first. In fact, Google sits first in relevance and accuracy of results while also ranked among the favorite in many other areas of user satisfaction (e.g., overall opinion of site, comprehensive results, reliability, and so forth).
In my opinion, Google is strictly a search engine, meaning you won't find any special features such as a stock market ticker, travel reservantions, or even shopping. There are no news headlines or free e-mail accounts (not to the general public -- yet); this search engine is simply used when you want to do quick, comprehensive searches yielding excellent results.
Google’s search system is relatively a simple one with many advantages and disadvantages. One advantage that I am quite enamored of is the use of the minus sign to exclude a word and quotation marks to enclose a phrase. Every search word you enter is required to appear in every item that is retrieved, therefore, you don't have to enter the plus sign to require that a word be displayed in your results.
When searching for directions and/or maps via Google’s interface the user can simply type a specific address in the search box and the links will be displayed, leading them to either Yahoo! Maps or Map Blast. Clicking on one of those links will then display a street map for the address you entered. This is a very innovative way of finding directions because it now alleviates the need for the user to search for his directions on an outside site, say for example Map Quest.
Another plus in the Google corner is the pioneering way they use dictionary definitions. What Google will do is link to the definitions of your search words (although this is not indicated on Google's search page). After a search has been completed, the first line displayed tells the number of results for the searched words and how long the search actually took. If the searched words are underlined, the user can click on them and be connected directly to the definitions gathered by dictionary.com (there are definitions from several other dictionary resources but the most prevalent listings are from this resource).
The only possible disadvantage with which I fault Google is that they simple do not search for "stop" words. These common words include words and characters, for example to, the, and I. Google will not search for them even if they're part of a phrase. In order to force Google to search for these words in a phrase, you will need to enter a plus before each very common word.
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