The absolute center of the internet as we know it. Other services, email, documents, web traffic analysis, etc, only make it even more mission critical. I doubt there is a day I go on the internet and don't use one of their services.
Google has become a household term, and is the search engine anyone I know goes to when doing research or looking for any type of information. I give them 5 starts. Regarding child safety, that's a difficult thing to judge, because Google isn't exactly a "site", but a huge collection of sites, and the content one sees depends almost solely on the search terms. Regarding children though, I'd say it's kinda' like the old term, "buyer beware", but certainly nothing negative towards Google. They just present the information that's available.
Google is overall one of the biggest, smartest, and most helpful company on the internet. In my book, however, this does not excuse the tracking adware, cookies, and click trackers they have littered their web pages with. It's called Google Analytics, look it up on wikipedia. Look it up in your own internet cookies. Or just look it up on Google! Even worse, Google sells the technology all over the internet, to help web page creators make money.
And the child safety thing is just a no brainer. Try image searching something innocent; like milk, candy, or beach. This really isn't their fault, as they have Petabytes of information to try to review, and that is just impossible to keep up with.
One further comment if allowed.
I had given Google a bad rap, but had been misinformed by a friend. I have Google Chrome on my linux box, and the developers are a friendly bunch
of guys !
Google is a unique and very informative site. It's surely where I go to find information !
My only objection is that advertisers can pay to have their search results placed first, but OVERALL, Google is so much better than Bing :), Yahoo, or any of the other so-called search engine wanna-be's. Thumbs up, 5* rating !
This blog site has alot of information at no charge, The site owner is honestly helping peeps who have no clue. I use his information and have never once received any malicious information that corrupted my computer.