It all started with a question.
In 1938, mathematician Edward Kasner asked his young nephew to name a number that had a hundred zeros.
Milton Sirotta, only 9 years old, answered "googol," unaware of the implications this word would have.
For mathematicians, it became a legitimate mathematical term, and for ordinary people, the word evolved into "Google," which became synonymous with finding information on the Internet.
Google's popularity banks on the sentiment that it finds good results, and its motto, "don't be evil," seems to convince people that, like a benevolent librarian, the site is poised to find and retrieve all user requests.
Google opponents do exist, although they are far and few between.
But no one can deny that Google has become a pervasive force in America, perhaps even in the world.
Part of pop culture
Google headquarters are in Silicon Valley, Calif., but the company can be found everywhere from e-mail to college classes. On the Web site Amazon.com, a search for books with the word "Google" retrieves almost 4,000 books.
There's even a "Google for Dummies."
Google has wormed its way into the English language and into all sorts of popular culture; the verb "to Google" was used in an episode of the TV show "Sex and the City." People were probably already using it before then, said Stephen Wechsler, a UT linguistics professor.
"I know that I was already using it, and I don't remember watching that episode," Wechsler said, laughing.
Unfortunately for Google, the English language often usurps a noun, turning it into a verb. If the word becomes used too loosely, the company loses its brand status and may lose proprietary perks, which is what happened with brands such as Xerox and Kleenex.
To guard against this, the company has taken to issuing cease-and-desist orders to those who use their name without permission.
That's why Loriene Roy, a UT information school professor, thought long and hard before naming a new course. She finally settled on "Beyond Google."
"There was controversy about whether the title would offend people," Roy said. "We didn't want to make Google mad, because Google is accepted as a kind of an ultimate searching tool."
UT's not the only school jumping on the Google craze.
Joe Janes, an information studies professor at the University of Washington, taught a class on the search engine last spring after noticing that Google had been "popping up" in the news and popular culture. The course was offered as a graduate special topics course, which meant that students only met for a total of 10 hours. One of the projects he assigned was to find out what other Google courses had been offered.
Washington's was the first of its kind, Janes said.
Although the class was popular and well-received, Janes is not teaching it again because special topic classes are only offered once, he said.
Like no other search engine, Google has fully assimilated into popular culture.
"It's assumed a larger-than-life persona," said Paul Piper, a librarian at Western Washington University and information studies expert.
How does a search engine become so popular? What's the formula for success?
Even the experts aren't sure what Google's magnetic power is.
"It's just fascinating - no one ever felt the same way about the library catalog, the dictionary or the phone book," Janes said.
A creative culture
Fans from everywhere flock to pay homage to Google with fan sites, from Jens Thieme, a Swiss man who runs a site where fans can submit logo art, to Tiff Ting, a UT graduate student who just created the "Google Fanatics" group on Thefacebook.com last week.
"There's kind of a mania around; I was surprised there wasn't already a group," said Ting, who started using Google two years ago.
Other users are fans of Google's attitude.
"They've worked really hard to make it look friendly," Janes said. "If you look at the front page, it's very clean. There's not clutter, and it looks fun."
That playful streak is manifest in all the personalized options Google offers.
Users can switch their languages into Klingon, Hacker "133t" speak, Muppet "bork, bork, bork" or even Latin.
"I use Google in Latin - I like using a language that's been dead for 1,400 years, because it's kind of ironic," said Mark Miller, a UT physics freshman.
Like Ting, Miller sees Google as a place to work one day.
It's attractive to many potential employees because the Google contract specifies that 20 percent of work time is to be spent working on personal projects, said Dennis Hwang, Google's 26-year-old logo illustrator.
"If you think of something cool, you can usually develop it," he said. "So you have a lot of opportunities here that would probably be smothered in other places."
Then there's the Googleplex, or office headquarters, with its free gourmet food, gym and other freebies, said Mikhail Bilenko, a UT computer science graduate student who is interning at Google.
But mostly, people seem drawn to Google's intellectual drive, ambition and ideals.
"It's a fast, dynamic place with lots of really smart people," Bilenko said.
The darker side
There's another side of Google that's not quite so happy.
Daniel Brandt, of San Antonio, is probably the company's most outspoken critic.
Some might even accuse him of being a conspiracy theorist, but Brandt said he stands firmly by what he's written on google-watch.org, a site devoted to telling the world what's wrong with Google.
The first problem is privacy, imposed by Google's "immortal cookie," which doesn't expire until 2038. A cookie is a small file that a Web site leaves on a user's computer every time that user visits. The Web site can then tell how many times a particular site has been accessed by a particular user.
"I don't understand what the big deal is," Bilenko said. "You can just disable cookies if you care that much."
Google's new e-mail, Gmail, also infringes on privacy, Brandt said, because Google does not disclose how long e-mail is kept on its server after the messages are deleted.
"You don't know if something you deleted is really gone," Brandt said.
He worries that if a national intelligence agency subpoenas Google files, the company would hand over files that users thought were deleted a long time ago.
And Brandt's not alone in his concerns.
"We all have stuff on our laptops that we don't want anyone to see," Janes said.
Sometimes it's not simply a question of whether information is purposely gathered.
"Whether it's intentionally, or as a side component, gathering information can be potentially harmful," said Piper, the Western Washington librarian.
And he may have a more unique concern: Google just released Google Scholar, a search engine specifically focused on finding scholarly articles and research materials. Librarians and information specialists say they worry that people will only use Google instead of supplementing it with other sources.
"I'm worried whenever people get bad information instead of good," Janes said.
Whether you're looking for some place to eat, researching Herman Melville or writing an e-mail, Google is a source for information. But ultimately, how users manipulate Google is entirely dependent on them.
"It's only a slice of a slice of the information world, and, like any tool, it can be used well or badly," Janes said.
FACTOIDS
* Google's original name was BackRub.
* Googleduel.com lets two different search terms duel to the death. The site compares the frequency of each word on the Internet.
* Major Google operations such as Froogle and Orkut.com, a social networking site, are Google employees' personal projects.
* According to Whois.net, there are 43,934,517 registered sites that have Google in the address.
* This is what a googol looks like: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000.
* Googolplex, which is similar to the name of Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, is the number equal to 10 to the power of googol.
* On Nov. 22, Google searched 8,058,044,651 pages.
* Google is also a calculator. If you type in a math problem, it will give you the answer.
* There are 105 different languages in Google personal preference settings, including Klingon, Pig Latin and Elmer Fudd.
* American users cannot always see holiday Google logos if the logos depict a holiday that is country-specific.
* Labs.google.com showcases Google projects that are still in the experimental stages.
Source: Google
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