Google, is the world’s most popular search engine with a 39% market share of the search engine business totalling 59.3 million unique viewers. Even beating out Microsoft and Yahoo which have only a 30% share each (Sharma, D.C., 2004). It has long maintained a fun and quirky image, even naming it's main office in Mountain View, California the Googleplex. This fun image coupled with its immense popularity has turned Google into a cultural symbol.
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The word ‘Google’ has an interesting origin. First and foremost, the name 'Google' is a play on the word 'Googol', which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Although accepted to be coincidental, the name has also been interpreted as being the result of the merging of the words ‘go’ and ‘ogle’ (Wikipedia, 2005). Furthermore, in British slang, to “throw a googly�? means to ask a hard or unanswerable question (Wikipedia, 2005).
Today, the term ‘google’ is so widely used and recognised that it has worked its way into modern dictionaries. The online dictionary, http://www.dictionary.com, defines ‘google’ as a verb, meaning ‘to search for information on the Internet’ (Dictionary.com, 2005).
The concept behind what would be known as Google was conceived in the January of 1996 as the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin who at that time were PhD students at Stanford University. The two met while working on their computer science PhDs sometime in the spring of 1995, and despite initial problems seeing eye to eye, they eventually found a common interest in the retrieval of relevant information from large amounts of data. BackRub, as it was known was a mathematical algorithm that determined the importance of a website by analyzing the "back links" pointing to the given website was born.
During Google’s early days as BackRub, it was housed in Larry Page’s dorm room, and was constructed from a network of computers that Page and Brin procured from the school’s loading docks. The new technology’s popularity was beginning to grow in the campus.
By the start of 1998, the search engine had grown to a substantial size, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought more hardware with which they would be able to support further growth. The problem now was that they did not have enough funds to grow the service any further. They decided that they would have to look for investors and put their PhD studies on hold and went about writing a business plan.
Google came into being when Page and Brin visited Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and a friend of a faculty member at Stanford. After a demonstration, Bechtolsheim was interested, but did not have time to go into any in depth discussion regarding the service. He just made them a cheque of $100000 which was made out to Google Inc., which at the time did not exist. This prompted the two to quickly set up the company. Google Inc. officially opened for work on September 7th 1998. It was situated in a friend’s garage, and played office to Page, Brin and Craig Silverstein, who was Google’s first employee. At this time they were already handling 10,000 queries a day, and were starting to receive substantial media attention. In February 1999 they moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to accommodate the growing number of staff, and eventually to the Googleplex, which is Google's current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
The search engine’s massive popularity lies in its ability to turn up results for search queries very quickly and accurately (University of Minnesota “Browsing the Web�). Google’s database boasts a 6-billion-item index, which includes web pages as well as newsgroup articles and images (Parker, P. 2004). The site receives up to 250 million searches a day, which equals to roughly 18.7 million hours spent on the site per month (Sullivan, D., 2003, Sullivan, D., 2004).
Google's PageRank algorithm, which was named in part after Larry Page, analyzes recursive links between sites. This works by assigning every page its own PageRank which is determined link to the page, and how important the linking pages are. This helps to determine the sites that are of actual importance, and enables Google to deliver results that are as accurate as possible. Sites on the web are gathered by the Googlebot, a Web Crawler which trawls the internet going through links. Google then creates a digital copy or a cache of pages that are new or actively tries to update the cache, removing links that are no longer working and updating pages that have been changed all this takes place on Google’s server (Price, G., (2001)). The cache’s purpose is to allow dead links to be viewed even though the source is down for whatever reason. The pages do not stay in the Google cache, perpetually, and although a useful feature has been the source of some legal disputes (Olsen, S., 2003).
Google’s ability to handle such a huge volume of traffic lies in its unique computer architecture, which distributes a search query over many servers operating in small networks. Queries are distributed over the networks depending on the user’s physical proximity to that network. According to a consensus it is believed that Google has an estimated 100,000 servers, although a somewhat more accurate estimate puts the number of servers at between 63,272 machines to 79,112 machines. On the higher end, Google would have whopping 316,448 GHz of computing power, 158,224 GB of RAM and 6,180 Tb of hard disk space (Levy, S., 2004, Tristan, L., 2004).
Google’s stock market capitalisation has greatly risen and the stock price has tripled since the IPO. In early 2005 the shares outstanding were up 100 million to 273.42 million. A total of 53% of that was held by insiders which made the float 127.70 million. The company has not reported any treasure stock holdings as of the Q3 2004 report. (Wikipedia, 2005)
Also, Google shares gained nearly 4%, on June 1, 2005, after Credit Suisse First Boston raised its price target on the stock to $350. That same day, rumours suggesting that Google would be included in the S&P 500 began circulating, partly due to the fact that when companies are first listed on the S&P 500 they usually experience an increase in share price. On June 7, 2005, Google was valued at just under $52 billion. This cemented its position as one of the world’s biggest media companies by stock market value. (Wikipedia, 2005)
Throughout 2005, Google has continued to develop new products and tools. These include Google Desktop Search, a new blue Google Mini, Google Local and Google Reader.
On March 7, 2005, Google announced the launch of the latest version of Google Desktop Search, a free downloadable application which allows users to search for many more file types, including PDF and MP3, on their own computers. Google is the first desktop tool to access the full text of web page history and the only one to search AOL instant messages (Google, 2005). It is available in many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean (Google, 2005).
In April, 2005, the success of the Google Search Appliance, spawned the creation of the new Google Mini, an integrated hardware/software search appliance that indexes all content within a company’s intranet or public website (Google, 2005). It is currently being used by hundreds of law firms, educational institutions, government agencies and other small to medium sized businesses to manage their information.
The official launch of Google Local, was announced on October 6, 2005 (Google, 2005). Google Local merges the technologies behind Google Local and Google Maps. The product offers users access to a variety of relevant information. This includes integrated local search results and detailed driving directions, and includes features such as draggable maps and satellite imagery. Users can visit http://local.google.com to find local search and mapping information in one place.
Google Reader is a web-based feed reader that makes it easy to locate and subscribe to online feeds to help users organise and stay updated on the ever-increasing amount of web information they consume on a daily basis. The product was announced on October 7, 2005, and features a comprehensive feed finder, multi-media feed displays, an easy-to-use interface, plus easy sharing capabilities with email and “blog this�? features (Google, 2005). The product is available to try at http://labs.google.com/.
Google’s increased size and value puts it in direct competition with other large mainstream technology companies. A prime example is the rivalry Google has with Microsoft particularly due to their respective overlapping services (Wikipedia, 2005). Both companies offer search (both online and local desktop searching), webmail (Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail), and other applications. Rumours of a Google browser even exist, and if accurate, would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Despite this, the corporate feud between these two technology heavyweights is most directly expressed in hiring offers and defections. For example, many employees of Microsoft who worked on Internet Explorer have gone to work for Google (Wikipedia, 2005).
Google also struggles to keep up with other rivals like Yahoo, despite being the number one search engine (Wikipedia, 2005). Despite differing greatly in terms of the services they offer, Google is striving to redefine itself as an internet media company, like Yahoo, instead of being known as an internet search company (Wikipedia, 2005).
Over the years, Google has added more services to its repertoire, either through innovation, or through buying over other companies.
Google Groupswas created in early 2001, when Google acquired Deja.com’s Usenet newsgroup archive, formerly known as DejaNews.com. With entries dating back top 1995, greatly increasing the scope of its search engine.
That same year,the Google Phone Book was also introduced, which served as online yellow pages. In the middle of that year, Google also introduced a multi language function which allowed its users to select any of 40 non-English language versions of Google to search with.
Google's Image Search function launched in Mid 2001, allowed users to search for images through Google. It claims to search 425 million images and 3 billion websites.
Google Toolbar is an application which integrates itself into web browser toolbars and allows users to utilize Google search functions without accessing the Google homepage.
The Google Zeitgeist, launched in Mid 2001 allowed users to follow search trends by displaying the most popular search topics.
Google unveiled Google Catalogue search towards the end of 2001, which provided users with more than a thousand online mail order catalogues.
Google News, was introduced in March 2002. It is a continuously updated news archive dredged from news sites around the world. This was followed by a year end Google News beta release, which was the first ever online news site compiled completely by computer algorithms.
Froogle was also released in 2002, and it enabled users to search the web for products to purchase.
Blogger, a popular weblog site became a Google service when Google bought over the company which runs it, Pyra Labs in, 2003. The Search by Location service was also introduced, which allows users to find information by geographic location. The Google New Alerts Services was also launched. This service sends emails to subscribers alerting them on the latest listings on Google News.
GMail was released on the 1st of April 2004. The email service, which provides a Gigabyte of storage space, has been received with mixed reactions; some praise the service for its innovative interface and large amount of storage, and others going up in arms over privacy issues (Bass, S., 2004).
Orkut.com went online in 2004. It is an online community and social networking service, not unlike Friendster. There is talk that Google wants to get grab a share of the growing online community and social networking pie, which the company has not commented on (Sullivan, D., 2004).
Google Earth allows users to search for images of specific areas of the Earth's surface, and includes three dimensional mapping of some urban areas.
Google Maps provides users with maps, satellite images, locations of desired services, and provides step-by-step directions to and from specified locations.
Google has received many industry awards and accolades. Some of these include the following:
Sherwin Huang 18:31, 9 Sep 2004 (EST)
Michael chappelow 10:05, 30 Aug 2005 (EST)
Roxanne Hawes 11:43, 26 Oct 2005 (EST)
