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Archive for July 7th, 2009
07
Jul
09
Techpost #2 – Google (History)
Tech 114 – Tech Post #2
Elvin Cheung Kam Yiu
301087482 kyc25
Summary
This paper is a brief analysis of search engine technology, particularly Google. We will look at this technology from a historical perspective. This analysis will include discussion about the precedents of search engine technology, its current status and future predictions. In order to present this study as a comparative analysis, I have divided it into three historical time periods, namely Pre-industrial Period, Industrial Period and Post-industrial Period. The basic aim of this analysis is to study the changes related with search engine technology over the period and how it has affected the society as a whole. It is to be noted that throughout the paper Google will be synonyms to search engine technology.
Introduction
It has rightly been said that information is power. It gives the power to make changes, and it also plays an important role is assisting the ability to take decisions. But it is not easy to find the right kind of information at the right time; this is where the concept of search engines came into picture. A search engine is a remotely available program that lets you do keyword searches for information on the Internet. There are several types of search engine the search may cover titles of documents, URLs, headers, or the full text (Google Dictionary). But just because search engines use internet as their platform does not lessens the contribution of earlier search approaches.
Pre-Industrial Period (up to 1765 A.D.)
The first or pre-industrial phase was a very long period of equilibrium when information flow was limited by simple tools and weak machines. This was a period where scientific experiments were not common and religious thoughts and beliefs dominated the scenario. Information search and flow was mainly confined to libraries and hard bound journals. The books and research papers of this period have references, which can be thinking of as links going out. People can track the source of original information by tracking these references. The first legal use of article-references was seen in court cases. In order to you a trusted reference, people used to take help of “The Citation Index”, which inverts the database of links and was able to find out which paper was referenced more frequently by other researchers while writing their paper. This idea which was relatively new at that time was developed by legal professions of countries which followed common law, like United States and England, in order to note and keep track of reported judicial decisions. One such example of such Index in USA is “Shepard’s Citations”. All the referenced cases were referred, affirmed, overruled or criticized by a legal citer. If a particular case if followed, then it will become as a “Leading Case” and was more frequently cited. Apart from covering judicial decision Shepard’s Citations also covered law review articles.
Industrial Period (18th and the early 19th centuries)
The second or industrial phase was very short period of non-equilibrium that ignited with explosive force when powerful new machines temporarily lifted all limits to growth. This period was dominated by innovation in manufacturing industry which was started with the invention of steam engine, which in turn made a big contribution in speeding up the flow of information. Apart from searching and tracking the source of information from books and articles, Encyclopedia and Britannica were used to search for any related information. Search was fragmented and mainly confined to the reach of elite or scholar class. With the advancement and ease of travel, people also used educational tours to visit different countries and places to track the source of information. Until this period the search technology was confined to legal and scientific environment with little or no use by common public.
Post-Industrial Period (19th century – Till date)
As early as 1956, “white-collar” workers had outnumbered “blue-collar” workers, marking the passage from an industrial to a “postindustrial” era. This is the period where High-technology industries like aerospace, biological engineering, and especially electronics and computers defined the business frontier. The world became truly globalized and the hunger for information grew like never before. Computers played a very important role in revolutionizing the flow of information. The Internet and World-Wide Web (post 1991) are the greatest telecommunication of post-industrial period.. People begin to use internet to search for digitized information. It was very quick, easy and efficient. But the search options were still fragmented and lacked semantics. It was quite troublesome to get specific information on a particular topic. But this changed in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a reliable and efficient online search engine named Google. Google indexed web pages were based on a formula that could produce improved results based on different formulas, including a way that could produce rank-wise search results depending upon the relevance to the searched topic, and the frequency by which the page was seen on other search. It worked on “SEO” or search engine optimization, which used web-spiders and crawlers to make search more comprehensive.
Conclusion
At present Google is dominating the search engine market, but there is tough competition from other players in the industry. The future will be dominated by the technologies which are capable of providing search on mobile-platform; bioinformatics search options which are based on emotional understanding on machines. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, once said that Google’s toughest competition are small innovative startups , which can come up with new and improved search technique with the potential to conquer the market. Google is expanding its services by diversifying its services. It is providing an email service ‘Gmail’, a social community named as ‘Orkut’, a software application for organizing and editing digital photos ‘Picasa’, facility to view maps and other imagery captured directly from the satellites ‘Google Maps’ etc. It will be an interesting battle in the virtual market, which in the end will be beneficial not only for the customers but also for industry as a whole.
References
Duncan, C. Richard (1996). “The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post Industrial Stone Age”. Referenced 5 July, 2009, from
Macgregor, Douglas A. (2001).“Resurrecting transformation for the post-industrial era”. Referenced 5 July, 2009, from
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-3330925_ITM
Shannon Ross (2007). “The History of the Net”. Referenced 5 July, 2009, from
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/starthere/historyofthenet.html
