Google has been bestowed the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The decision was announced today by the Jury in Oviedo.

Considered to be the best Internet search engine of all time, Google allows millions of users all over the world to access a universe of knowledge and information in a quick, well-structured way. Its creation has meant a revolution, providing access to all kinds of contents and reinventing the technological principles that ruled search engines.

This candidacy was put forward by José Luis Pardos, ambassador of Spain and member of the Jury for the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. It was seconded by Al Gore, 2007 Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for International Cooperation, and Vinton G. Cerf, 2002 Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Technical and Scientific Research.

With a worldwide presence, Google handles hundreds of millions of requests from users each day and performs searches over millions of web sites and millions of images. With the aim of organising global information and making it more globally accessible and useful for any user with access to the Internet, the Americans Sergey Brin and Larry Page, created Google ten years ago and have managed to employ the most cutting-edge technology for the benefit of knowledge, beating all records of efficiency. Through its subsidiary Google.org, it has recently initiated a philanthropic campaign, assigning part of its profits to aid development and environmental projects.

At the beginning of 1996, Sergey Brin (Moscow, 1973) and Larry Page (Michigan, USA, 1973) developed a search engine called BackRub, the main feature of which was its ability to analyze the back links pointing to a given website. In 1997, BackRub adopted the definitive name of Google due to its similarity to the term googol, the name for the number 10 raised to the power of 100, a reference to the amount of information that they were attempting to organise.

They founded Google Inc. in 1998, establishing company headquarters in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California. A year later, they were managing a budget of 25 million dollars and moved their offices to Googleplex, Google?s current headquarters in Mountain View, California. What started out as a university project is nowadays considered the best search engine in the history of the Internet and, despite its current leading position, Google continues to progress and enhance the search for information. It has recently acquired You Tube, a video broadcasting platform, and DoubleClick, the leading international online publicity agency.

In collaboration with the UNESCO, it has started up what is known as the Literacy Project, which, by allowing searches within books, academic texts and shared teaching material all via the same website, aims to foster reading and education throughout the world. In addition, Google Book Search means that any user, in any corner of the planet, with access to the Internet has access to culture. This product includes content from the collections of the most prestigious libraries and works from more than ten thousand publishing houses from all over the world. However, not only written but also geographical information is available in the search engine thanks to Google Maps, Earth and Sky, which allow users to gain more in-depth knowledge of both the planet and ?in the near future? the firmament thanks to the building of a large telescope that will soon be available. Its latest projects include Google Gears, which allows its services to be used without being connected to the Internet.

In 2000, Google received the Webby Award for the Best Technical Achievement. Brin and Page were named 2002 "Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future" by MIT's Technology Review magazine, and hold honorary MBA Degrees from the Instituto de Empresa (Madrid, 2003). They received the Marconi Fellowship Prize in 2004 from the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University.

The Prince of Asturias Awards aim, to quote from the statutes of the Foundation, "to reward the scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic work performed by individuals, groups or institutions worldwide". As part of this spirit, the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities "will be bestowed upon the individual, working group or institution whose creative work or research represents a significant contribution to universal culture in these fields".

This year a total of 25 candidatures from Albania, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Iran, Mexico, Poland, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela and Spain ran for the award.

This is the fourth of eight Prince of Asturias Awards to be bestowed this year for the twenty-eighth time. The Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts went to the Youth and Children?s Orchestras of Venezuela, founded by José Antonio Abreu, the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation to the organisations leading the fight against malaria in Africa: Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre (Tanzania), the Malaria Research and Training Centre (Mali), Kintampo Health Research Centre (Ghana) and Manhiça Health Research Centre (Mozambique), and the Scientific and Technical Research Award was jointly granted to five scientists, worldwide leaders in the creation of new materials for the benefit of mankind: the physicist, Sumio Iijima; the engineers, Shuji Nakamura and Robert Langer; and the chemists, George M. Whitesides and Tobin Marks. The corresponding Awards for Social Sciences and Letters shall be announced in upcoming weeks, with the Prince of Asturias Awards for Sports and Concord being announced in September.

Each Prince of Asturias Award, which date back to 1981, comprises a diploma, a Joan Miró sculpture representing and symbolising the Awards, an insignia bearing the Foundation's coat of arms, and a cash prize of 50,000 Euros. The awards will be presented in the autumn in Oviedo at a grand ceremony chaired by H.R.H. the Prince of Asturias.