What is Google?

Google.com is a website whos mission is, in its own words, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". It is the largest search engine on the internet, and additionally offers services such as email, maps, news alerts, shopping, calender, blogging tools, and more. According to Alexa.com, Google.com is the third most popular website on the internet.

In the beginning, Google.com differentiated itself from other search engines in the technology used to rank the importance of any particular webpage. While most search engines active during the time of Google.com's launch rated a pages' importance based upon the amount of times a certain keyword appeared on the page, Google.com rated paged based upon the number of other webpages linking to it. Thus, Google.com returned higher quality websites to searchers, and quickly overtook the largest search engines of the time.

However, Google.com has seen its fair share of controversy. Despite the company's principle of "You can make money without doing evil", may people have accused the service of collecting users' personal information and various privacy exploits. The most famous of these was the Gmail.com advertising criticism. As Gmail.com delivers advertisements based upon the content of a users' email, some people had believed that Google employees were reading users' mail. In fact, the technology behind the system has a computer parsing all displayed mail, and serving relevant advertisements. No Google.com employee has access to Gmail.com users' private information, including preferences, demographics, and mail.