Features

Google search engine widens its net around the Internet

The Associated Press
Wednesday December 12, 2001

SAN JOSE — Internet search engine Google Inc. announced Tuesday that it now offers direct access to more than 3 billion Web documents, including newsgroup postings back to 1981. 

The company’s index, searchable at www.google.com, previously linked to about 2.5 billion documents. Its archive of Usenet postings had gone back about six years. 

“This announcement is an important step in Google’s ongoing effort to provide search services that are fast, easy to use and that help people find the information they need,” said Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. 

Unlike other search engines, queries on Google return results beyond standard Web pages.  

In addition to newsgroup postings, the engine finds images, Microsoft Office files, images and documents in PDF format. 

The Usenet archive, available in Google Groups, now contains 700 million messages in 35,000 categories. Usenet is an Internet-based bulletin board that predates the World Wide Web. 

“The Google Groups Usenet archive reveals a detailed view into two decades of history – that’s 10 years’ worth of content that existed before the birth of the Web,” said Sergey Brin, another Google founder. 

Google also deployed a feature that pulls up headlines relevant to a search from various newspapers and news agencies. 

Since it started in 1998, Google has developed one of the world’s most popular search engines, using a method that sifts through Web pages to list results based on the relevancy to the search request. 

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On the Net: 

www.google.com