The Guardian: Engine trouble

In the mid 1990s, two Stanford university [former students] dreamed up a search engine with a unique cataloguing system. Now Google is the biggest on the web. But not everyone is a fan - some say it unfairly favours certain websites. The latest critic is China, which has blocked it completely

Repressive regimes fear little so much as mockery and derision, and so maybe the Chinese government's apparent decision this week to block the internet search engine Google had something to do with the 14th result it throws up when you search for the name of that country's president. It is an interactive, animated game called Slap The Evil Dictator Jiang Zemin, and for China's 46 million internet users, it just became a little harder to track down.

With an important congress of the Chinese communist party scheduled for November, Beijing's crackdown on dissent - and especially on the banned and persecuted spiritual [practice], Falun Gong - hardly came as a surprise. But targeting Google did. The company released a statement explaining that it was "currently... working with Chinese authorities to resolve the issue". It was phrased in the bland language of international diplomacy, but it failed to address the most obvious question: what was a search engine doing conducting international diplomacy in the first place? And how, exactly, did a Californian firm founded by a couple of university dropouts, using old doors for office furniture, wind up striking panic into the core of an authoritarian world power?[..]

The internet bubble may be an embarrassing memory today, but Google - which started out as just as speculatively as any other web firm - has rapidly achieved monolithic status on the web. Though it has never paid for advertising, word of mouth has made it, by far, the world's most popular search engine, with more than 150 million searches a day. Two billion web pages are indexed on its servers, and users can search in 66 languages. Former competitors - AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite - have fallen by the wayside, locked in desperate attempts to reinvent themselves. It has spawned a dedicated, self-appointed watchdog site, Google-watch.org.

Veteran web users nostalgic for the old, pre-commercial days of the internet love its spare, white search screen and its refusal to follow its rivals by branching out into lonely hearts adverts, or travel services, or online car dealerships. And yet, simultaneously, it makes plenty of money - it pulled in an estimated $65m last year, in advertising and in selling its searches to other websites, including AOL. "There is this core techie audience, and they love what the web used to be, and they like Google because it's clean and fast," says Danny Sullivan, proprietor of the respected news website SearchEngineWatch.com. "But I suspect that the majority don't go there because it's fun. They go there because it gives them the answers that they're looking for."[..]

"Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B," the company says. "But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links that a page receives: it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important'." It is a "uniquely democratic" method, Google claims, making it easiest to find pages other people have declared worth finding.[..]

Google knows things. Not only does it index more of the web than any of its competitors, offering makeshift translations of pages between languages - it remembers, too. The company archives millions of web pages on its own computers, giving them a life beyond their creators, which provides another potential motive for the Chinese block: even if the computer hosting a Falun Gong website is seized and destroyed, the page persists in Google's collective memory.[..]

"There is this obsession with Google now," says Danny Sullivan, at SearchEngineWatch. "But you can go to other sites - to Teoma.com, to Alltheweb.com - and you can get similar results. Google is a leading way to search, but its competitors are not dogs. They can connect people to [..] information in China just as well as Google can." Or maybe even better, depending on what you're looking for. On Alltheweb.com, Slap The Evil Dictator Jiang Zemin comes out fifth.