have you heard of this website called Google?

not a peep I ever hear of this WWW site which was here the entire time. it’s called “Google”, which seems a poor choice of name. after all, it’s quite textually similar to the famous number.

there is an immense amount of informational text available on the WWW, an internet protocol and software suite created precisely for the purpose of sharing academic research. but it is scattered eclectically across HTTP services, with no obvious way to discover them. when I want to tap into these sappy informational innards, I have only been familiar with the most popularly known full text search solutions for doing so, which are indeed very blunt instruments.

I have used Bing, for instance, which has intense preoccupations other than what I generally wish to extract from it. one such preoccupation is that in addition to or perhaps significantly more than drawing out information from the WWW, it has this other purpose of being a broadly scoped online shopping catalog. such provisions tend to be conflated with results matching the information-seeking queries or sometimes even drown them out. I have reported this bug to customer service, but they can’t seem to do anything about it. there is also this strange sort of markov chain that spills out onto the page before the actual results that one has to sort of gloss over or scroll past.

there are a few alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo (these things certainly all have strange names). amusingly, DuckDuckGo seems to be in many respects nearly identical to Bing. the search results are often exactly the same. there’s little more to say about it.

these search tools are usually quick to recommend this forum that compiles research into admittedly often very well written compendium. nonetheless, I often tire of reading text whose editing decisions ultimately arise from the squables of WWW forum users. however, the search tools often provide little else of relevance. they don’t even seem to actually effectively perform full text search and instead poorly try to guess what you mean. sometimes they even erroneously append your IP address' region into the query, evidently in a poor attempt to increase the results' relevance to your locality.

in contrast to these other search tools, Google provides a significantly more streamlined interface. I can enter a query and without ceremony or interference I am led to quite informational and often fascinating articles related to the query. for example, here are the results for “tracing JIT”:

Google provides links to results not in WWW-native hypertext but in PDF, which is sort of like postscript. the documents are formatted for print, rather than for screens as hypertext is.

using it is often quite enjoyable. sometimes it doesn’t precisely lead me to what I want, but it usually leads me to something interesting. sometimes, it gives me what I want, and even more than that. for example, when I was looking for data on phonemic inventories, it presented me with these results:

does phoneme inventory size correlate with population size? what a fascinating question. I can’t wait to read what they conclude.

Google’s front page proudly declares their motto.

I wonder if they’ve ever had any other mottos.

it is truly difficult to comprehend what in the world the creators of these other WWW search tools were thinking. Google proves that it is quite possible to access a remarkable wealth of information on the WWW. if I have piqued your interest, you can try it out here.