Beyond the original word-search capability, Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquakes, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, sports scores, etc. There are special features for numbers: prices; money/unit conversions (“10.5 cm in inches”); calculations ( 3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2 ); package tracking; patents; areas codes; plus rudimentary language translation of displayed pages.

A Google search-results page is ordered by a priority rank called “PageRank” which is kept secret to avoid spammers from forcing their pages to the top. Google Search provides many options for customized search, such as: exclusion (“-xx”), inclusion (“+xx”), alternatives (“xx OR yy”), and wildcard matching (“*”).

From the Website

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

When you visit www.google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you’ll be able to find information in many different languages; check stock quotes, maps, and news headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search billions of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages — more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.

What’s a Google?

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Other Information

• Type :  Public
• Founded : Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) : Sergey M. Brin, Lawrence E. Page,
• Headquarters : Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served : Worldwide
• Key people : Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Ph.D. (Chairman) & (CEO) Sergey M. Brin (Technology President),  Lawrence E. Page (Products President)
• Industry : Internet, Computer software

Contact Information

• Google Inc.
  1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
  Mountain View, CA 94043
  Phone: +1 650-253-0000
  Fax: +1 650-253-0001