Mind googling
I can’t resist any longer. The time has come to write about Google, the web’s ur-site and, in my view, one of the most staggering human inventions ever. Whatever it is in the information universe you seek, simply go to google.com, punch in the keywords and va-voom! More results than you can imagine in less time than divides first and second place in an Olympic sprint final. All I need to do is type in the names of my obsessions-Prospect magazine, the CIA or Britney Spears-and up pops the relevant website.
Google was born as part of a research project at Stanford University in 1998, at a time when other sites, such as Lycos, Altavista or Yahoo, were the premier portals on the web. Unlike them, Google presented itself unadorned: a simple white screen with a search box in the middle of it, shorn of advertising. The competitors have since been crushed and the figures for Google have climbed to 150m daily searches in more than 60 languages; 2 billion indexed web pages; the fourth most visited site in the world.
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