[The following excerpt is from a recent Wall Street Journal article about the attempts to devise a better Internet search engine. ]Newfangled search engines look to offer something better--by putting people's opinions, rather than keywords in the driver's seat. Take the new offering from Google Inc. Like Yahoo! Inc. and Excite Inc. before it, Google was founded by a group of Stanford University computer-science students who wanted to make it easier to find high-quality information on the Net. (The Palo Alto, Calif., company's name is a simplification of "googol," the word for the incredibly large number represented by a "1" followed by 100 zeroes, and is meant to convey how big the search engine's index is.) Google also uses a robot, appropriately named Googlebot, to crawl the Web. But instead of counting how often a keyword appears on a site, Google tries to determine how highly regarded a Web page is by other Web authors. To create its search-results list, Google counts the number of other Web pages that contain hyperlinks to that page, elevating the most-linked-to sites to the top. What's more, it looks for links only from the pool of Web pages that are themselves links by having other important sites link to them, too. If that makes your head spin, it should: Larry Page, chief executive of Google, acknowledges that the search engine's underlying logic of importance is circular, but argues it's the most effective way of finding quality information on the Net.

--Nick Wingfield, "In Search Of. . . ," The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1999.