"..when I want to quickly get to the most authoritative sites on a topic, I use a search engine called Google."

"This search engine uses a complicated mathematical analysis, calculated on more than a billion hyperlinks on the web, to return high-quality search results so you don't have to sift through junk."

"Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two...Stanford graduates with a great idea and a wacky name. Google (www.google.com) indexes Web pages using an ingenious algorithm which ranks a site on the basis of who links to it."

"Google is a new search engine that takes advantage of the cyberspace community's collective expertise. Just as you trust the links on a really good site to get you to other good pages, Google crawls the Web scooping up hyperlinks and uses them to figure out how important a page is by who is pointing to it."

"the Net's hottest new search engine, (which) draws on feedback from the Web itself to deliver more relevant answers to customer queries."

"Despite the remarkable success of portals built around search engines, there has been little published research on improving Internet search results. Page and Brin stepped into this breach with Google."

"...if you need to find the best sites--fast, for subjects ranging from medieval life to ISDN technology, make this the first place you look."

...Google gets remarkably smart search results by using a mathematical algorithm that rates your site based on who links to you. The ranking depends not simply on the number of sites that link to you, but on the linking sites' own importance rating. The result is a kind of automated peer review that sifts sites based on the collective wisdom of the Web itself.

The program is complex, but the proof is in the results. Since discovering Google a few weeks ago, I've been so impressed with its usefulness and accuracy that I've made it my first search stop....

...Yahoo! and newcomer Google! were the only sites in our roundup to return highly relevant hits consistently, even on searches for very general or common terms such as Internet standards...

...Newcomer Google! deserves an honorable mention for its generally uncanny ability to find a great hit for your number-one result...

Google!
Searching the Web has increasingly become a two-stage process--execute a search, then wade through the results trying to find what you're actually looking for. Google!, an ongoing research project at Stanford University, helps you access the most relevant finds more quickly, and rivals Yahoo! for finding that handful of key sites you may be looking for.

The site's unique PageRank function indicates how many Web pages point to a particular document. Google! uses PageRank to decide which documents in the result set you might want to see first. For example, when searching for the National Institutes of Health, we entered the acronym NIH, and the NIH home page appeared at the top of our list. Google! is so confident that it includes an "I'm feeling lucky" button that retrieves Google!'s top pick for your search.

Google!'s large collection of cached pages is equally useful. We found ourselves visiting a document's cached page to assess its relevance, then linking to the live page for time-sensitive information.

If you're used to performing complex Boolean searches, you'll find Google!'s search capabilities limiting. It really offers only simple keyword searching. The ability to truncate search terms would be a welcome addition to this promising new site.