From today’s edition of the Globe and Mail:
"Google, which has become one of the world’s most popular search engines, is launching a Canadian site.
Google.ca offers a series of Canadian-only features, among them the ability to search pages from Canada only and customize Google’s interface and search language to French.
Also featured is Google’s AdWords program, a quick way for advertisers to target their markets by connecting their ads to search terms entered by Google users.
All of Google’s other options are available, including the advanced search and the now-familiar “I’m feeling lucky” button. Users can also choose additional preferences such as searches limited to 26 other languages, control the number of results shown and do SafeSearch filtering, which blocks explicit sexual sites from the results.
Behind the Canadian user interface is the same Google database, operated from computers based in Mountain View, Calif.
Google, a private company founded by a group of mathematics PhD students from Standford University, is not yet three years old and employs a mere 200 people.
The database, which Google claims claims is the largest in the world, with 1.3 billion URL addresses, processes a staggering 100 million searches a day, said Google spokeswoman Cindy McCaffrey Tuesday.
Google Canada is the seventh regional version launched by Google. Other versions have been designed for Germany, France, Italy, England, Korea and Japan. Yesterday’s launch of Google Canada coincided with the launch of Google Switzerland, which operates in the four languages spoken there.
Moroeover, Google has 130 “partners” in 30 countries which use the search engine off their site — one of them is The Globe and Mail.
Google’s next step, Ms. McCaffrey said, is to open up the database to wireless devices.
The search engine takes its name from “googol,” a number used by theoretical mathematicians who define it as 1 with 100 zeroes after it. A “googolplex” is a number even larger than that.
The name was introduced to mathematicians by Edward Kasner (1878-1955) in 1938. Kasner had asked his nephew, Milton Sirotta, who was then 8, what name he would give to a really large number, and young Milton answeres “googol.” Kasner also defined the googolplex, equal to 10googol — that is, 1 followed by a googol of zeroes."
