Rant #1,989: Searchin'

Today is September 27, the 270th day of the year.

During leap years, it is the 271st day on the calendar.

It is a pretty ho hum day.

I know that singers Meat Loaf and Shaun Cassidy share this day as their birthdays.

I'm not the biggest fan of either one--save Mr. Loaf's "Paradise By the Dashboard Light"--but I do wish both of them a happy birthday.

But they also share the day as their birthday with something else--something not human, something that you can't hold in your hand, an inanimate "thing" which is as animate as could be.

Today is the Google search engine's 19th birthday.

I will bet that you thought that it was around forever, but Google is still a teenager.

Two Ph.D students at Stanford University--Sergey Brin and Larry Page--developed this search engine that we all use on the Internet to find things that we are interested in, and while Google started out as simply another search engine, it has developed into a multinational corporation, with its speciality Internet services and products.

It has seemingly been part of our lives since the day it was launched, and that is why I will bet that most of us thought it has been around far more than 19 years, but it hasn't.

Some Internet rating services list Google.com as the most visited web address in the world, and even if such measures are often questioned, how can you doubt that?

Google is so popular that that actual word "google" has taken on new shapes and meanings. It has become a verb, an action word, as in "go google it" when you need some information about something.

As popular as Yahoo is, you never hear anyone say "go Yahoo it," so as popular as Yahoo is as a search engine, the word "yahoo" has never taken on a new guise as "google" has.

But it always wasn't known as Google.

In fact, one of its original names was "BackRub," believe it or not, and then when it was changed to "Google," it originally was "googol," but later changed to the form we know today.

It was different then the other search engines at the time, because it highlighted the relationship between one website and another.

Don't ask me to explain this; I can't. All that I know is that when looking for information, Google was quicker than the other search engines, and its findings were more to the point of what one was looking for.

And that is what made it so immediately successful, and why it continues to be successful today.

As I write this Rant, millions and millions of people are using Google to search for something, everything under the sun.

Some even use Google to look up their own names (yes, I have done this, on Yahoo too, and who can deny that they haven't done this at least once).

Personally, I have found that whatever algorithms it uses to find what it finds for you are often more to the point and complete than what you can find using Yahoo, but Yahoo is pretty good in what it does, too.

In fact, the one thing that Yahoo has that is much better than what Google has is a decent Web page, and honestly, that is where I start my Internet day each and every day that I use my computer.

But Google has stood its ground as probably the best search engine around. It does not need a Web page to validate this.

So happy birthday to Messers Loaf and Cassidy, and happy birthday to Google, too.

Let me look up both Loaf and Cassidy on Google and find further reasons to like them, too.