In 1996 two computer science students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were searching for a theme for their doctoral dissertations. Among the topics considered by Page was the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web — then less than five years old — by trying to understand its link structure as an enormous graph. What developed from their collaboration was an extraordinarily powerful search engine and they registered the domain google.com on 15 September 1997. According to the partners, “We chose our system’s name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10 raised to the power 100, and fits well with our goal of building a very large-scale search engine”.
The Google search engine is used daily by all CapeRay’s staff. However, it’s not the only software application we depend on. As mentioned last month, we measure the effectiveness of our blog by embedding code that takes advantage of Google Analytics to document all the traffic to our site. We have recently added a Google Custom Search button at the top of each of our website pages that allows users to track down any word or topic on our site. We have also inserted a Google reCAPTCHA plug-in at the bottom of the blog page to prevent annoying spam.
Video clips and animations are now an integral feature of all companies’ marketing efforts and YouTube, purchased by Google in 2006, has been the preferred platform for CapeRayTV. Our blog stories each week always include one or two images and a great source for these is Google Images, including the company’s original logo seen below.
As a company on the cutting edge, CapeRay has to keep abreast of relevant research publications, and for this purpose Google Scholar allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants. When protecting our intellectual property, or exploring prior art in the field of breast imaging, we always turn to Google Patents. Finally, we also use Google Maps to tell people where we are located, or to prepare for an overseas trip.
Fifteen years after Google was founded it is difficult to imagine how CapeRay could function without this amazing array of tools. Perhaps most astonishing of all, we have not paid a single cent — directly to Google that is — to use any of these tools. It would not be an exaggeration to say that every day we pray to the Great God Google!