Just for the heck of it, I performed a Google search for Google. The search generated 1.83 billion results. The top result was a current news item about the brewing war between Google and Microsoft. To me, the most surprising thing was the lack of sponsored ads next to the search results. The only one was from Google itself, suggesting you make Google your home page.The rest of the results show you just how popular certain Google services are, or just how popular Google thinks it services are. First item below the news article is the result for Google itself, with a tidy little description of what Google does -- as if we didn't know already.

The second result is Google Maps. Google Maps is a great service that I use almost daily, but it is second in the market to MapQuest for online mapping.

The third result was the one I found most interesting. It is for Google Video. Not YouTube, but Google Video. I know Google offered its own video services, but I thought they had been folded into YouTube. The format of the page bears a slight resemblance to YouTube in organization and layout, and was featuring current videos. I am not sure how popular this site is, but Google must feel it is pretty popular for it to be ranked third. (YouTube itself was not listed until page 8 of the results, and that particular result was Google's channel on YouTube, and not the main YouTube site.)

The rest of the results on the first page are basically a what's what of Google services, including Groups, Google.org, News, Earth, Image search, Directory and Tool bar. Google Documents and Gmail don't appear until the third page of search results.

You don't find a non-Google result until you get to the bottom of the fourth page. That result is the New York Times' general informational page about Google. Really? Do that many people look at a generic info page about Google on the NYTimes site? I guess they do.

I didn't get to go through all 1.83 billion results. Google owns the first 50 results or so. After that, more and more results from other Web sites are filtered in. Unfortunately I did not find nirvana on this quest for enlightenment.