Google, the largest search engine on the Internet, was founded in 1996. It started as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, who was exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web for his dissertation thesis. The name he gave his study, “Google,” comes from the misspelling of the word, “googol,” which refers to the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. Although not quite the number its name signifies, Google receives several hundred million inquiries each day from users around the world. One of the main reasons Google has become the most used search engine on the net is due to the PageRank system, a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical rank to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web. PageRank gives every site on the Internet a ranking between 0 and 10. The ranking is determined by the number of other pages linked to it. Each link is calculated as a vote, therefore, the more links a site has, the more votes it gets. Google analyzes the importance of the web site that provides links to other web sites. If Google determines that a web site is important, it assigns a higher PageRank ranking to links to that particular site, which, in turn, influences the . site’s ranking. There have been some criticisms of the PageRank system. Some critics, for example, claim that it is unfairly biased in favor of the larger web sites. Other critics point out the fact that the criteria for determining the importance of a web site is not subjected to rankings by peer or professional reviewers, who would better scrutinize the ranking decisions. Another flaw in the system noted by critics is the use of “Google Bombs” on websites. The term refers to the manipulation of the ranking of a given page by explicitly placing hyperlinks that will directly affect its ranking. Google announced in January, 2007 that they had changed their search engine algorithm to make it more difficult to manipulate search results. Though there are critics of Google and its PageRank system for its system of ordering search results, it remains as, arguably, the most effective way of providing relevant websites for a web search and is considered the most used search engine. Therefore, Google shows no sign of losing its title as the optimal search engine. The word “google” has even been added into the Merriam Webster Collegiate dictionary and the Oxford dictionary as a new verb. It means “to use the Google search engine to acquire information on the Internet.”