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Google Offers Immediate Access to 3 Billion Web Documents

Award-Winning Search Engine Delivers More Documents, Latest News, and Daily Content Updates to Global Users

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 11, 2001 – Google Inc., developer of the award-winning Google search engine, today announced it offers consumers direct access to 3 billion web documents – further extending the company’s position as the world’s largest and most comprehensive search engine. Google’s diverse collection of documents includes web pages, images, and newsgroup messages.

Google also unveiled several new enhancements that make available the latest news, refreshed daily web content, and for the first time, a 20-year archive of newsgroup conversations via Google Groups. In addition, Google Groups was released from beta today.

"This announcement is an important step in Google’s ongoing effort to provide search services that are fast, easy to use, and that help people find the information they need," said Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president of Products. "To search our collection of 3 billion documents by hand, it would take 5,707 years, searching twenty-four hours per day, at one minute per document. With Google, it takes less than a second."

World’s Largest Collection of Web Documents

Google users now have the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of web documents right at their fingertips and can immediately find the information they need using the following services:

  • Google Web Search: The company’s flagship search service now offers more than 2 billion documents – 25 percent of which are non-English language web pages. Google Web Search also offers users the ability to search for numerous non-HTML files such as PDF, Microsoft Office, and Corel documents. Google’s powerful and scalable technology searches this comprehensive set of information and delivers a list of relevant results in less than half-a-second.
  • Google Groups: This 20-year archive of Usenet conversations is the largest of its kind and can serve as a powerful reference tool, while offering insight into the history and culture of the Internet. Google Groups was released from beta today with 700 million postings in more than 35,000 topical categories.
  • Google Image Search: Comprising more than 330 million images, Google Image Search enables users to quickly and easily find electronic images relevant to a wide variety of topics, including pictures of celebrities and popular travel destinations. Advanced features include search by image size, format (JPEG and/or GIF), coloration, and the ability to restrict searches to specific sites or domains.

"The Google Groups Usenet archive reveals a detailed view into two decades of history – that’s ten years’ worth of content that existed before the birth of the web," said Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of Technology.

The Latest News and Fresh Content

Google searches the top news websites throughout the world to find news stories relevant to users’ queries. News results are presented to users in a "News" section at the top of search results pages. In addition, Google refreshes millions of web pages every day to ensure that Google users have access to the most current information.

About Google Inc.

With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry’s most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. Google’s technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards; two WIRED magazine Readers Raves Awards; Best Internet Innovation and Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech from TIME magazine; and Editor’s Pick from CNET. A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, AOL/Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google’s investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. More information about Google can be found on the Google site at www.google.com.

Contacts:

Nathan Tyler
650-930-3531
nate@google.com

David Krane
650-930-3596
david@google.com

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Google is a trademark of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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