Finding What You are After on the Web....A Word About Search Engines
& in Particular, What makes Google so good?

BY DOUG BEDELL Knight Ridder News Service

Google is the little search engine that could. Since its launch in September 1998, this brainchild of two Stanford University doctorate students has chugged past giants in the search industry.

Google.com has grown from 5.7 million visitors in September 2000 to 18 million visitors last month, says research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.

"I think the public has seized on Google because it gets good relevant results," says Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch. com.

Its innovations have earned numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards and Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo Internet Life.

So what makes Google good?

Brainpower. Google Inc. is a private firm throbbing with gray matter. In 1995, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two dropouts from Stanford's doctoral program in computer science, anticipated that searching the ever-expanding Web was a growth industry.

The company has continued to bring more brainpower to its ranks. Today, more than half of the 250-member Google staff are engineers. Fifty hold doctorate degrees.

Does one thing well. Google's obsession is searches.

"Other companies at that time were all thinking about becoming portals," says Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired. "Some companies indicated to us that, essentially, they thought search was a solved problem. We didn't think that at all."

No intrusive ads. Moguls of privately held Google say ads account for about 50 percent of revenue. The other half comes from partners that use Google technology. In a big plus, Google limits ads to text messages tailored to the nature of user inquiries.

Innovation. The new tabbed interface on Google.com is a visible byproduct of a research team that is constantly testing search concepts. New features are constantly emerging. Google has recently begun indexing links to PDF and Word files scattered across the Net.

The Google toolbar. However, its simple search window stands out as particularly useful. Available at toolbar.google.com, it has been installed by more than 3 million search freaks who want instantaneous access to Google from browsers.

Humor and style. The simple elegance of Google's rainbow name on a white background is a welcomed respite from the mishmash of other search engines.

...It is GMI's humble opinion that when you are looking for specific laboratory instrumentation, Google, more often than not, will lead you to a source for that specific product.  Alternatively,  you may just choose to let GMI provide you with the specific technology you require as we have been doing for discriminating laboratories from all over the world.
 

If you are anything like us here at GMI, we are drowning in information.  We are an information company and finding information (and instrumentation) for you, our customer, means efficiency and savings.    Bottom Line:   It helps us save you money! 

Have you ever been frustrated by the search capabilities of your off-the-shelf software?  Have you every been frustrated by Outlook's or Excel's search function.  I have.

We'll that has all changed !  I installed the Google Desktop Search Tool and was 'blown away'   WOW- Profoundly intelligent, and fast !

We at GMI once again have found yet another reason to love Google

What is Google Desktop?:

Search your own computer

Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if we had photographic memories. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.

After downloading Google Desktop Search, you can search your personal items as easily as you search the Internet using Google. Unlike traditional computer search software that updates once a day, Google Desktop Search updates continually for most file types, so that when you receive a new email in Outlook, for example, you can search for it within seconds. The index of searchable information created by Desktop Search is stored on your own computer.

In addition to basic search, Google Desktop Search introduces new ways to access relevant and timely information. When you view a web page in Internet Explorer, Google Desktop Search "caches" or stores its content so that you can later look at that same version of the page, even if its live content has changed or you're offline. Google Desktop Search organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result.