There has been a lot of news lately about Google, especially since the company announced they are going public. Google has become a household word overnight.

Everybody on the Internet knows what a Google is. If you had asked me 3 years ago I might have said that Barney Google was a comic strip character. I was curious why the unusual name was chosen and discovered that it came from the word googol that an author coined in a book on mathematics. It referred to the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros that reflects Google's objective of searching through an infinite amount of data on the web, a mind boogling task.

Google has always been secretive on how they do things and much of what one reads is pure speculation. For example, Google told the SEC they spent about $250 million on hardware. Based on back of envelope calculations one speculator came up with between 45,000 to 80,000 servers. But it has also been speculated that they may have just one or a few humongous servers.

As with most dot com companies, Google was started by a couple of computer science grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1995 with a search engine called "Back Rub." In 1998 Google Inc was started with a staff of three and during the beta stage began processing 10,000 searches each day. Once USA TODAY and PC Magazine wrote about them, Google blossomed and never stopped. Today, nearly 2000 people work there. It sounds like a great place to work. They told the SEC they intend to continue offering many of the perks that, in addition to stock options, have kept employees hanging around. These include free meals, washing machines and doctor visits.

How does Google find your answers? It's not like you probably think. They don't go out searching on the web for an answer. Instead they have "spiders" or "robots" that continuously scan the web for information to bring into their own data base that is searched. How spiders work is another story but your search is confined to Google's huge data base, not the web.

How does Google make money? It's estimated that advertising accounts for 95% of Google's revenue and their chief competitor is Yahoo who currently brings in almost twice the revenue of Google despite the fact that Google's revenue is gaining faster. It is interesting that more than half of Google's traffic comes from overseas and yet foreign companies only account for about 30 percent of their revenue.

I'm convinced that with enough patience one can find the answer to just about any question using Google. I'm always looking for answers to oddball questions. Here's one: "Where do birds die?" With millions of birds shouldn't we see bones laying around or see birds falling out of the sky? I'll let you put the question in Google and see the answer. The curious thing, however, is that Yahoo came up with a plausible answer that 5 other popular search engines all pointed to, including Google. Could it be that nobody really knows where birds go when they die?

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