Google is the best (google.com)

Member Name: west_jenn

Product:	google.com
Date:	10/04/04 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: quick, easy to use

Disadvantages: you may get lots of irrelevant results

Google is one of the internet's most successful search engines. As of September 1 2003 it had 3.3 billion indexed pages As a resource it is freely available to anyone with internet access. The basic search format of the site is easy to use, even for an internet novice. It has a clear, uncluttered home page free of the advertising that you see on some other search engines.

Google's most important function for it's many users is the ability to search quickly and find relevant information. I always use google when looking for information on the internet as it is very user friendly and the searches are usually super quick with most searches taking about 0.20 seconds to carry out.

One of the disadvantages with google is that sometimes the sheer volume of search returns is overwhelming and you can find yourself looking through a lot of rubbish before you get to something relevant. However, this is also true of lots of internet search sites.

Google has an advanced search facility which allows the searcher to attach more conditions to the results returned. There is an option to find results with all the words of the search string, the exact phrase and without the words. There is also an option to show the first ten, twenty, thirty, fifty or one hundred results.

The advanced search option offers a number of ways to tailor a search to the individual searcher?s needs. There is an option to return results in different file formats i.e. abode acrobat, Microsoft excel etc. You can specify results to be returned which have the search term appearing in particular places i.e. page title or URL of page. Also you can specify that the results found are from sites updated within the last six months.

Google has some other useful features. There is an option to search the internet for pictorial images. Using the preferences option the searcher is able to specify sites written in either any language or a particular language from a
choice of thirty five languages.

There is also a language tools option. This includes a translation section for texts and web pages for major languages such as French and German. There is an option to have google's interface in any one of ninety seven languages, some of them being as obscure as Ocatian and Xhosa.

Google has many advantages as a search engine. It is very quick with searches taking around 0.15 seconds. The home page design is clear and uncluttered without the advertising and decorations of some other search engines.. The UK pages option increases the relevance of returned pages for the UK searcher and gets rid of any confusion regarding duplicated place names in the UK and US. Google also has an impressive global scope with domains in ninety five countries. So hurray for google and I wouldn't use anything else.

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