Google celebrates seventh birthday with search engine expansion

by Joe Lepper, Brand Republic 27-Sep-05, 14:00

LONDON - Google has announced an expansion of its search engine to make it three times larger than those of its rivals, as part of promotional activity surrounding its seventh anniversary.

Promotional activity includes a birthday-themed home page as well as the search engine expansion.

In a release posted on Google's blog site, software engineer Anna Patterson, said: "For our seventh birthday we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index."

This latest expansion to its core search engine product comes as part of a raft of brand extensions being pursued by Google.

The firm is set to launch a Wi-Fi offering, with promotional activity already under way for a service called Google Secure Access.

It is also in the process of making millions of books and excerpts from books available worldwide, through its Google Print, Google Scholar and Google Library initiatives.

The latter, which involves digitising work from a number of US libraries has caused outrage among authors in the US concerned about infringements to their copyright.

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