Google's power alarms critics, entices dedicated daily users

The search engine processes 200 million search requests a day.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In five mind-blowing years, Google has blossomed from a nerdy college experiment to a mainstream sensation so ubiquitous that its goofy name is now synonymous with looking things up.
Millions of people turn to the Internet search engine every hour, trusting Google to speed through its index of 3 billion Web pages to find just about anything imaginable.
In less than a second, Google routinely finds lost friends, merchandise, pop trivia, academic research, news, pornography and even references to God, to whom Google has been compared.
"It's hard to imagine a day when I'm not using Google for something," said Todd Goldman, a 37-year-old marketing executive in Silicon Valley. "I can almost always find what I'm looking for on the first or second page of results. It's almost like black magic."
Google's seemingly mystical powers inspire awe and dread -- reverence for the search engine's apparent omniscience and fear about its Big Brother potential.
"It's way too powerful," said Daniel Brandt, a fierce Google critic who started a Web site to air his misgivings. "It's scary because if Google drops you, you could be out of business in no time."
Competition war
Google's influence is perhaps best measured by the 200 million search requests it processes per day, up from 40 million just three years ago.
The steady growth has turned Google into one of the Internet's biggest success stories and made the still relatively small company of 1,000 employees a target for some formidable foes. Both Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are searching for ways to steal Google's thunder in a showdown that could reshape the way people find their way around the Internet.
Yahoo has committed nearly $2 billion to its Google counterattack. Microsoft is devoting an unspecified portion of its $49 billion war chest to building a better search engine.
Privately held Google isn't saying how it intends to protect its franchise. Company executives declined to be interviewed, preferring to focus on the Google mantra of "delivering the best search experience on the Internet."
Google apparently has ambitious growth plans. The company just signed a lease to move its Mountain View headquarters across town to a space five times larger -- a 500,000-square-foot complex now occupied by a fallen Silicon Valley star, Silicon Graphics Inc.
The push to topple Google is being driven by new marketing approaches that have turned search engines into profit machines.
Advertisers spend big for prominent listings in specially marked search results -- $2 billion this year, with robust growth forecast for the rest of this decade.
For now, at least, no one is better positioned to reap the rewards than Google.
Yahoo and Microsoft "are spending a ton of money to get something that Google has built from the ground up and has been fine-tuning for years," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, an industry newsletter. "That gives Google a great advantage."
Friendly relations
Sullivan believes Microsoft might seek to buy Google rather than try to play catch-up. Neither Microsoft nor Google have expressed any public interest in a marriage.
With one of the world's most recognized brands, Google would likely demand a hefty price. No one will know for certain what Google is worth until it makes a long-awaited initial public offering of its stock -- something insiders say won't likely happen until next year at the earliest.
Google's revenue this year is expected to range between $700 million to $1 billion. Google has been profitable for at least two years, an advantage that has limited the number of investors since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company in their Stanford University dorm rooms in 1998.
After getting $1 million from a handful of family and friends, Page and Brin raised $25 million from venture capitalists in 1999 and another $10 million from Yahoo in 2000 when the two companies were more friendly. Google hasn't needed another infusion since.
Google's technology is built around a secret formula called "PageRank" that rates the relevance of Web sites based on the number of links from other relevant Web sites. The method has raised concerns that Google has created a caste system in which a group of elite Web sites largely determine the popularity of other sites.
But Web surfers have embraced the approach. "Googling" information has become so popular that Google.com attracts some of the heaviest traffic on the Web. Only Microsoft's MSN.com, AOL and Yahoo lure more visitors in the United States.