When I started at uni about ten years ago search engines were beginning to prove popular tools. Back then, many of them run on metatags - these are essentially tags that people would put in the computer code behind their WebPages that described what the page was about. This lead to some unscrupulous people putting incorrect information in their mega tags, so their site would be returned on a search about something completely unrelated, meaning their site registered more hits.

I asked a couple of mates, who could have been considered computer geeks, what the people in the know used to search the web. I was told there was a little heard of site called Google that was proving to yield accurate results. This is apparently due to it using something known as spider indexing (I don't know any more about it than this!).

So I tried Google, and from the first use until present, it has been pretty much been the search engine I exclusively use. It is great for many reasons;

It is a very very simple layout. The screen has a Google logo, which often changes to reflect to something topical, and a text entry box. Beneath the text entry boxes are two buttons - "Google Search", which displays the search results, and "I'm feeling lucky" which takes you straight to the top result - useful when you are searching something clear such as BBC or Football365.

If you just chose the "Google Search" option - like most people normally do, you are returned a clear list, with extracts of the page that match your search displayed. There are advertising slots down the right hand side and on the very top of the page, but they do not interfere with what Google thinks are the most accurate returns.

Added to this, Google has several other tabs such as "shopping" which finds you many places selling a specific item and it's price, "maps", which can include direction from A-B, "images", which is self explanatory.

Overall it is in my opinion the best search engine out there and deserves all the recognition it gets.

Well done Google!!