Google was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University in 1997 as a research project. It became the leading search engine 10 years ago. Such is its popularity today, that it receives several hundred million queries each day through its many different services.
Google search engine accepts queries and tries to find the answer to the query. After doing so it displays the results on the result page. Other than text, one can also search for images and videos. Apart from its searching capability, Google has many other special features that make Google even more special. These features include similar synonym words, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, sports scores, news, shopping, Gmail etc. There are other special features for numbers including ranges (e.g. 70-73), prices, temperature, money/unit conversion (e.g. 12.3cm in inches), calculations (e.g. 3*4 – sqrt 6), package tracking, patents, area codes and language translation of displayed pages etc.
These features make Google so special that it becomes almost impossible to stay without using this search engine. The popularity of Google means that it must have an excellent performance otherwise people would not be using it. Considering the number of users it has, it can be stated that Google has definitely not disappointed many. According to Alexa Traffic Rank, Google is the most viewed site today. Keeping in mind the salience of user experience associated to Google, this essay would basically focus on the empirical aspects of Google’s performance.
While judging the performance of Google one of the most important things is the run time of the search. Run time basically is the duration of the period in which the computer program executes itself. Google has a run time which has amazed many of its users. It takes very little time to display the results of the search, which sometimes is even less than the human reaction time.
Furthermore, for any query, Google can display the first thousand results with up to a hundred displayed per page. The option to specify the number of searches is only available if ‘Instant Search’ is not enabled. If ‘Instant Search’ is enabled, regardless of how many searches you want, only 10 are displayed per page.
Whenever a person starts typing anything on Google search, Google has this special function that displays several related texts that match the initial characters of what one has typed. This makes it quite simple for the user as now the person can directly choose any of the related searches that match the text one was about to type. However, this is not always the case as sometimes the related texts do not match what the user was about to write in the search box.
If a person does not know the spelling of a word or phrase or makes a typing error while typing in the search box and if it’s close to the original correct word or phrase, Google has another function that points out the mistake by displaying ‘Did you mean: ‘ followed by the correct word or phrase. This saves a lot of time as the user immediately knows what mistake he/she has made.
Google also has this feature of displaying the related queries that have already been previously searched, on the result page when a person is searching for something. However this is not always the case as Google might not be able to find any related searches of that particular data.
Google compiles information that makes it searchable via the internet. It not only caches or indexes pages but also take snapshots of the other different file types such as PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files and so on. It allows the user to access the file even if they don’t have the corresponding viewer application as the cached version is converted to (x) HTML. This results in the saving of precious amounts of time and resources of the user as the user does not need to download the specialist softwares.
On the other hand, Google Search may also be the source of user disutility instead of satisfaction. Google places a cookie on each registered user’s computer. This enables Google to track the person’s search history and retain the data for a year. For this reason it has been criticized a lot as people feel they do not have any privacy left.
Google’s Page Rank algorithm has been criticized a lot. This is because the relevance of the search is not always accurate. For example if one wants to find information regarding Michael Jackson, a member of the faculty of HKU, Google will display results of the famous American singer Michael Jackson first. Thus, the order of the search result is not always how you want it to be. Ordinary users like us tend to rely on the first pages of the Google search. Even the journalists rely on the first pages as they assume that everything listed is not important. A source tells us that Google helps us see only a small part of what one could see if one uses other research tools. The same source also said that Page Rank algorithm can be influenced by individual views of the Google staff as only they get to edit the information and decide what will go online and in which form.
In my opinion Google has many special features. It also has functions that enhance its performance and makes it user friendly and at the same time popular with the users. Moreover, it has an extremely short run time. However it has a few drawbacks as well as it is not perfect. The information we get from Google can be biased as it can be influenced by the Google staff. Also the order of the search is not always like how we want it to be. The privacy of users is also affected as the specially placed cookies enable Google to track vital information. The snapshots for SWF and text files cannot be converted into (x) HTML. I believe that despite the drawbacks, Google still has become one of the most important applications of our daily life. And if Google overcomes all these issues it will be even closer to becoming the perfect search engine.
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