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Search engine giant re-focusing on its core business - and it could take 300 years to get all of the world's information online
According to an article in The Times this week, Google - the search engine giant that dominates the world of online information - is pledging to demystify the hidden workings of its search engine as it returns to its founding business plan to make all the worlds information searchable online.
The move to refocus on its core business comes amid criticism that Google has risked losing its way after a breakneck drive to diversify into other areas.
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Some services, such as Google Finance, the companys venture into business information, have widely been dismissed as a flop, attracting only a fraction of the users who visit rival sites from competitors such as Yahoo!.
The long-time darling of the internet sector has also admitted that it has come to be perceived as overly secretive in the way it collects and orders information. To counter that, high-level executives are taking part in a roadshow to shed light on how Google searches the web and ranks content.
"Lets be clear here, there are no guys in a backroom smoking cigars," Douglas C Merrill, a Google vice-president who works on search, told Times Online.
The remarks come as businesses discover that ranking highly on Googles search tool which accounts for as much as 80 percent of the market in some countries is essential to trade on the web. At least one e-commerce site has sued Google this year for refusing to reveal why it was allegedly blacklisted in Googles search results.
For its part, the search engine today insisted it is concentrating on making searches "automatic and objective" through the use of algorithms complex mathematical formulas to order information.
"Search is hard,"Mr Merrill said. "It's not enough to have an answer, it has to be the right one. You have to respond to what the user meant not what he said.
"And you can't do this by hand because the web moves too fast ... Up to 20 percent of the content on it changes every month."
The most famous tool Google uses to order content is its PageRank system (named after its inventor and Google co-founder, Larry Page). It looks to see how many people have linked to a page from their own sites, to determine its popularity and usefulness.
"This is an incredibly simple and powerful tool ... and because you can work this out by doing the math, it is automatic and objective," Mr Merrill said.
However, despite Google saying that by briefing people on PageRank it is being more transparent, critics will point out that details of the system are already widely known. Indeed, it is just about the only mechanism Google uses in its search engine that has been widely disclosed as many as 300 others remain under wraps.
And machines can only do so much. Google also conceded that the scale of its operations, spanning different countries with different regulations, makes a completely automatic system practically impossible.
"There are things such as whether a piece of content is illegal, which cannot be decided by a machine and we have to use lawyers for that," a Google executive said.
The company has also chosen to apply strict censorship rules "by hand" on its sites in territories such as China, a move that prompted fierce criticism.
But the main message from the London Googleplex, the companys European headquarters, is that the mission to make available online all the globes extant content is only just beginning.
Google estimates that around 10 percent of the worlds information is currently online, and is exploring ways to make the remainder available through the web.
The project could take as long as 300 years, according to a recent estimate given by Eric Schmidt, Googles chief executive. According to the company, 70 per cent of its engineers are working on search-related problems.
At the top of the agenda are mobile services. From this week, mobile users in the UK will be able to access Gmail, Googles web-based e-mail service, and news, through their phones.
In the future, Mr Merrill suggested, users of such tools might not have to type in search terms or internet addresses. "Imagine a world where you could speak your search query - that would be pretty neat, wouldnt it?"
Google also has an army of engineers working on automatic translation tools that would render information in any language intelligible in any other.
But Googles new openness only extends so far. When pressed, the company remains characteristically coy on what it sees as the keys to its future success.
Asked about the search companys designs on the music market, for instance, one Google executive told Times Online: "We could tell you. But then wed have to kill you."
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