Google - History, Production, Acquistions and partnerships, Corporate culture, Salaries, Further reading
A multilingual Internet search engine that indexes and caches pages on the World Wide Web; derived from googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes). It was founded in 1998 by Stanford graduates Sergey Brin (born in Moscow, 1973 ) and Larry Page (born in East Lansing, MI, 1972 ), following their success in 1996 with the prototype BackRub. By the end of 1999 Google employed 39 people and was answering 3 million search queries per day. In 2006 it had over 5000 employees, covered more than 8 billion items, and the number of daily searches is over 200 million. The company was floated on the stock-market in August 2004.
George Reyes, CFO
| Industry | Internet |
|---|---|
| Products | See list of Google products |
| Revenue | $6.138 Billion USD (2005) |
| Net income | $1.465 Billion USD (2005) |
| Employees | 9,378 (September 30, 2006) |
| Website | www.google.com |
Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American public corporation and search engine, first incorporated as a privately held company on 7 September 1998. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Novell, is Google's CEO, after co-founder Larry Page stepped down.
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10100 (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros).
The verb "google" was added to both the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
History
Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. This appearance imitated AltaVista's, but incorporated Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.
U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing part of Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001.
Growth
With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies. Microsoft has been touting its MSN Search engine, and more recently its Windows Live search in February, 2006, to counter Google's competitive position. Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Maps).
Click fraud has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers," when it comes to click fraud.
While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has also recently begun to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media -- the Internet and radio -- with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Google was added to the S&P 500 index on March 31, 2006.
According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! However, independent estimates from popular sites indicate that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google, with Yahoo! The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.
Criticism and controversy
Although Sergey Brin himself graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, his company Google Inc.
As it has grown, Google has found itself the focus of various controversies related to its business practices and services. For example, Google Book Search's effort to digitize millions of books and make the full text searchable has led to copyright disputes with the Authors Guild. Google's cooperation with the governments of China, France and Germany to filter search results in accordance to regional laws and regulations has led to claims of censorship. Moreover, Google advertisers have filed several lawsuits against the company in 2006, claiming that up to 14-20% of the clicks on the bills were in fact fraudulent or invalid.
Production
Technology
Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, a 2006 estimate consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world (See Google platform for more details on their technology).
Services
Google's core business model revolves around its Internet search engines. Google has several products that are search-oriented, including Web Search, Image Search and Google News. Google has also introduced Froogle, Google Groups and Google Scholar, which search shopping sites, Usenet archives and scholarly literature, respectively. Also, with the rise in popularity of blogging in 2005, Google created Blog Search, which allows the user to search frequently-indexed feeds, containing news and other features.
Google Maps provides an interactive mapping interface, where users can search for local businesses, or select a destination to drive to. It is growing in power and popularity, and Google has made several other products, based on the same technology. These include Google Moon, Google Mars, Google Ride Finder and Google Transit.
In 2004, Google and Keyhole provided Google Earth, a downloadable program that allows the user to zoom into nearly any spot on the earth, close enough to make out cars, and in some cases, people.
In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail. Gmail features improved spam filtering technology, combined with the capability to use Google search technology on individual email messages.
Google also branched out into the instant messaging market in August 2005, by introducing Google Talk, a Jabber-based instant messaging service.
In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which not only allows users to search and view freely available videos, but also offers users and media publishers to publish their content, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos. Videos offered via this service are protected using Google's own Digital rights management system.
Google has also targeted organizations and educational institutions, by bundling several Google products, namely Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Page Creator, into a service that can be implemented on a custom top-level domain.
Over the years since Google first began, they have launched over 70 products, several of which are experimental. Smaller Google projects are contained on the Google Labs website.
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would buy the popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. The brand, YouTube, will continue to exist, and will not merge with Google Video. Meanwhile, Google Video signed an agreement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group, for both companies to deliver music videos to the site.
On October 31st 2006, Google announced that it had purchased JotSpot, a company that helped pioneer the market for collaborative Web-based business software to bolster its position in the online document arena.
Acquistions and partnerships
Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies, often consisting of innovative teams and products.
One of the earlier companies that Google bought was Pyra Labs.
In October 2006, Google, Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion USD in Google's stock, making it the biggest deal in Google's history. Shortly after, on October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites.
Google has also worked with large companies to improve production and services.
On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1-million square foot R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers.
In October 2006 Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open source office program OpenOffice.org.
Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a $1 Billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL. As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This will allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services.
In August 2006, Google signed a $900 million deal with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp.
Corporate culture
Google is particularly known for its relaxed corporate culture, reminiscent of the Dot-com boom. Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual principles including, "You can make money without doing evil", "You can be serious without a suit" and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." Google's relaxed corporate culture can also be seen externally through their holiday variations of the Google logo.
Google's hiring policy is aggressively non-discriminatory and favors ability over experience.
"Twenty percent" time
All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent (20%) of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News and orkut, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that half of new product launches originated from 20% time.
Googleplex
As a further play on Google's name, its headquarters, located in California, are referred to as "the Googleplex" — a googolplex being 1 followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf.
In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet of office space in the second-largest building in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave. The office was specially designed and built for Google, and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL. In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others. It is estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent, and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including Foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area.
April Fool's Day jokes
Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon) and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced.
One can find other pranks hidden in amongst Google's pages; In 2005 a comedic graph depicting Google's goal of "infinity plus one" GB of storage was featured on the Gmail homepage.
IPO and culture
Many people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in the company's culture, because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company's employees would suddenly become millionaires on paper.
As Google grows, many analysts are finding that the company is becoming more "corporate".
Salaries
Originally, typical salaries at Google were considered to be quite low by industry standards. In 2005, Google has implemented other employee incentives such as the Google Founders' Award, in addition to offering higher salaries to new employees.
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