First, I'd like to welcome a whole bunch of new subscribers to the
Google-Friends list. This list is an announcement list for the Google
search engine which is available at http://google.stanford.edu/.
We recently added some new features to Google. The most significant is a
summary for each result that highlights where your query matched. This
makes for a much more informative summary than most search engines provide.
You can actually see where your query matched without having to download
each page.
Also, you can fetch contents from our repository by clicking on the
"Cached" link near each result. This often is faster than going to the
original, but of course can give you outdated information since it is based
on our last crawl. This feature can be very useful if the original is not
available or the network is down, you will still have access to the page
(but not the images).
We also made some enhancements to our search code that produce more matches
for many queries, improving performance significantly, we have also done
some more tuning of the ranking functions.
After combining our web server and search engine for better performance, we
have been experiencing intermittent problems with our system being down for
short amounts of time fairly frequently. If you have trouble getting to
the system, try back in a minute or two, and it should be back up.
Expect to see a lot of changes in Google in the next few months. We plan
to have a much bigger index than our current 24 million pages soon. Thanks
to all the people who have sent us logos, HTML and suggestions. Keep them
coming!
Have fun and keep googling!
-Larry
http://google.stanford.edu/
