Google News 2001

Google Search Information

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People have got used to finding HTML files - which are innocuous - with search engines and do not see it as a security risk. But Sullivan says it would be fairly straightforward to booby trap files to propagate viruses or worms.

Cindy McCaffrey, a spokeswoman for Google and not the anti virus company with the same name, says that if people are worried about viruses in a particular file, Google's search engine allows them to view the file as an html page.
Existing weaknesses

The file type search was launched by Google in November 2001 and means different types of file, such as Word documents or Acrobat files, are actually opened up and their content scanned. Other file types include postscript, Lotus 1-2-3, MacWrite, Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and rich text format files.

Larry Rogers of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University warns that passwords or credit card numbers can be contained within these files and may have searchable characteristics.

"But it's up to the web server administrator to make sure that they only hand out the information they want to be exposed," says Rogers. All the new Google tool is doing is exposing existing weaknesses in security, he says, as it can only find information that was already in the public domain.

Google define "public" as anything placed on the internet that is not blocked to search engines in any way. The burden, it says, rests with the website administrators to make their information secure. "We cannot crawl information that is located in secure servers," says McCaffrey.

There is a fine line between searching a website and "sniffing" for hackable weaknesses, says Sullivan. But, he insists, there is a genuine need for these new search services. "There's so much information within these file types," he says.

Our view: Obviously if some one is stupid enough to not be bothered to secure data or put sensitive information in a website that can be found then what can they expect. We think if Google puts this in place it will actually highlight security floors and make people act instead of react.
Google finds a few things it needs

Meanwhile, Google had acquired a cornerstone of Internet culture. In February, Google took on the assets of Deja.com and began the arduous task of integrating the huge volume of data in the Internet's largest Usenet archive into a searchable format. In short order, Google introduced improved posting, post removal, and threading of the 500 million-plus messages exchanged over the years on Usenet discussion boards.

As Google's global audience grew, the patterns buried in the swarm of search queries provided a snapshot of what was on humanity's mind. Sifting through a flood of keywords, Google captured the top trending searches and institutionalized them as the Google Zeitgeist, a real-time window into the collective consciousness. The Google Zeitgeist showcases the rising and falling stars in the search firmament as names and places flicker from obscurity to center stage and fade back again. Like an S&P Index for popular culture, the Google Zeitgeist charts our shifting obsessions and the impermanence of fame.

As Google's search capabilities multiplied, the company's financial footing became even more solid. By the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2001, Google announced that it had found something that had eluded many other online companies: profitability. And in a nod to Google's growing business impact, Dr. Eric Schmidt, whose long-time technology career included stints as CEO at Novell Inc. and CTO of Sun Microsystems, joined Google as CEO in August 2001.

Information without barriers

Google's circle of friends continued to widen. An agreement with Lycos Korea brought Google search to a new group of Asian Internet users. In October, a partnership with Universo Online (UOL) made Google Latin America's premier search engine. New sales offices opened in Hamburg and Tokyo to satisfy growing international interest in Google's advertising programs. Google's borderless appeal was also evident in its evolving user interface: Users could now limit searches to sites written in Arabic, Turkish, or any of 26 other languages.

Meanwhile the Google search engine evolved again and learned to crawl several new kinds of information. File type search added a dozen formats to Google's roster of searchable documents. In December, Google Image Search, first launched during the summer with 250 million images, came out of beta with advanced search added and an expanded image index. Online shopping took a leap forward with the beta launch of Google Catalog Search, which made it possible for Google users to search and browse more than 1,100 mail order catalogs that previously had been available only in print.

December also brought another milestone: The Google search index reached 3 billion searchable web documents, another leap forward in Google's mission to make the world's information accessible. Google's year came to a close, appropriately, with the Year-End Google Zeitgeist, a retrospective on the search patterns, trends, and top search terms of 2001.
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