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- This article is about the corporation. For the search engine produced by this corporation, see Google search; for the underlying technology, see Google platform; For the number, see googol; for other uses see Google (disambiguation).
| Google Inc.
<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;">Image:Google logo transparent.png</td></tr> | |
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: GOOG), (LSE: GGEA) |
|---|---|
| Founded | Menlo Park, California (September 27, 1998) |
| Headquarters | Image:Flag of the United States.svg Mountain View, California, USA
<tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Eric E. Schmidt, CEO/Director |
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. The company had 9,378 full-time employees as of September 30, 2006 and is based in Mountain View, California. 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,"<ref>Koller, David. "Origin of the name, "Google." Stanford University. January, 2004.</ref><ref>Hanley, Rachael. "From Googol to Google: Co-founder returns." The Stanford Daily. February 12, 2003. Retrieved on July 14, 2006.</ref> which refers to 10100 (the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). The verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."<ref>Harris, Scott D. "Dictionary adds verb: to google." San Jose Mercury News. July 7, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.</ref><ref>Bylund, Anders. "To Google or Not to Google." The Motley Fool via MSNBC. July 5, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.</ref>
Contents |
History
Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.<ref>Google Corporate History.</ref> They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).<ref>Page, Lawrence; Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Winograd, Terry. "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web." November 11, 1999.</ref> It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.<ref>Battelle, John. "The Birth of Google." Wired Magazine. August, 2005.</ref> A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.<ref>Li, Yanhong. "Toward a qualitative search engine." Internet Computing, IEEE. 2 (4), July-August, 1998, 24-29.</ref>
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. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.<ref>Google. "Google Milestones." Accessed 2006-07-12</ref>
In March, 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company settled into their current home in a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, also in 1999. The complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a 1 followed by a googol of zeros). Silicon Graphics leased the buildings to Google.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users. They were attracted to its simple, uncluttered, clean design — a competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on web pages filled with visual distractions. This appearance imitated AltaVista's, but incorporated Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of hits users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture, then Yahoo! Search Marketing).<ref>Yahoo! Search Marketing Website.</ref> While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing part of Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.
Growth
With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google.<ref>Dvorak, John C. "A Google-Microsoft War." PC Magazine. November 16, 2004.</ref> Microsoft has been touting its MSN Search engine, and more recently its Windows Live search in February, 2006, to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. 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. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."<ref name="clickfraud">Crawford, Krysten. "Google CFO: Fraud a big threat." CNN. December 2, 2004.</ref> Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers,"<ref name="clickfraud"/> 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.<ref>Levingston, Steven. "Google Buys Company To Expand Into Radio." Washington Post. January 18, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref>Gonsalves, Anton. "Google Confirms Testing Ads in Sun-Times Newspaper." Information Week. " January 10, 2006.</ref> They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
Google was added to the S&P 500 index on March 31, 2006. Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in Houston which was acquired by ConocoPhillips.
According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). However, independent estimates from popular sites indicate that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google, with Yahoo! a distant second and MSN occupying barely 5%. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.
Acquisitions and partnerships
- Main article: History of Google (Acquisitions 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. They were the creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform, first launched in 1999. This acquisition lead to many premium features becoming free. Pyra Labs was originally formed by Evan Williams, yet he left Google in 2004. In early 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online word processor, Writely. The technology in this product was used by Google to eventually create Google Docs & Spreadsheets. In late 2006, Google bought online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.<ref>La Monica, Paul R. "Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion." CNN. October 9, 2006. Retrieved on October 9, 2006.</ref> Shortly after, on October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites.<ref>Google Buys Wiki Startup JotSpot. October 31, 2006.</ref>
Google has also worked with large companies to improve production and services, including a long-term research partnership with NASA in a variety of areas, and a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. Recently, Google entered into partnerships with Time Warner's America Online, to enhance each other's video search services, and with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site, MySpace.
- See also: List of acquisitions by Google
Criticism and controversy
- Main article: History of Google (Criticism and controversy)
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. Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. A number of governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.<ref>Sharma, Dinesh C. "Indian president warns against Google Earth." c|net. October 17, 2005. Retrieved on July 23, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref>Mills, Elinor. "Google to offer advertisers click fraud stats." c|net. July 25, 2006. Retrieved on July 29, 2006.</ref>
Corporate affairs and 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." A complete list of corporate fundamentals is available on Google's website.<ref>"Google Corporate Philosophy." Google. Retrieved on August 31, 2006.</ref> 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. The result is a staff that reflects the global audience the search engine serves. However, the hiring process can be quite daunting and arduous for prospective candidates.
Originally, typical salaries at Google were considered to be quite low by industry standards. For example, some system administrators earned no more than $33,000 — $40,000 per year; at that time it was considered to be low for the Bay Area job market. Nevertheless, Google's excellent stock performance following the IPO has enabled these early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth. In 2005, Google has implemented other employee incentives such as the Google Founders' Award, in addition to offering higher salaries to new employees. Google's workplace amenities, culture, global popularity, and strong brand recognition have also attracted potential applicants.
After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as CEO Eric Schmidt, have accepted a base salary of $1.00. They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2006 report of the United States's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #12 with a net worth of $14.1 billion, and Larry Page was #13 with a net worth of $14.0 billion.<ref>Miller, Matthew; Serafin, Tatiana. "The 400 Richest Americans." Forbes. September 21, 2006. Retrieved on November 26, 2006.</ref>
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. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus, and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various cereals, gummy bears, toffee, licorice, cashews, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit, and dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda, and make your own cappuccino. In October, 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs.<ref name="solar">Richmond, Riva. "Google plans to build huge solar energy system for headquarters." MarketWatch. October 17, 2006. Retrieved on October 17, 2006.</ref> The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.<ref name="solar"/>
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. in Manhattan.<ref name="manhattan">Reardon, Marguerite. "Google takes a bigger bite of Big Apple." c|net. October 2, 2006. Retrieved on October 9, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref name="manhattan"/> 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.<ref name="manhattan"/> 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.<ref name="manhattan"/>
"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.<ref>"What's it like to work in Engineering, Operations, & IT?." Google. Retrieved on August 2, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref>Mayer, Marissa. "MS&E 472 Course: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series." (video link; an audio podcast is also available in MP3 format). ETL Seminar Series/Stanford University. May 17, 2006. Retrieved on August 2, 2006.</ref>
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 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. 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. In 2006 they came up with Google Romance.
One can find other pranks hidden in amongst Google's pages; for instance, in the languages list one can find a Bork! Bork! Bork! version of the site (imitating the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef), and they also offer versions in Pig Latin, "Elmer Fudd", Hacker ("H4X0R"), and Klingon. Another prank is Google's answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke, though it turned out (in both cases) to be a genuine announcement. 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,<ref>Associated Press. "Quirky Google Culture Endangered?" Wired Magazine. April 28, 2004</ref> 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. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company's culture.<ref>Baertlein, Lisa. "Google IPO at $2.7 billion." CIOL IT Unlimited. April 30, 2004.</ref> Later Mr. Page said, "We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements."
As Google grows, many analysts are finding that the company is becoming more "corporate". In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.<ref>Rivlin, Gary. "Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain." New York Times. August 24, 2005.</ref><ref>Gibson, Owen; Wray, Richard. "Search giant may outgrow its fans." The Sydney Morning Herald. August 25, 2005.</ref>
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.<ref name="howgoogleworks">Carr, David F. "How Google Works." Baseline Magazine. July 6, 2006. Retrieved on July 10, 2006.</ref>
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. Satellite images are also available. 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. The technology comes with hundreds of add-ons, like "Crime rate", to see the crime rate of the city you are zoomed in on, or "3D buildings", to create 3D models of the towers and buildings of larger cities. There are three available versions, "free edition", "plus", and "pro". The cost of plus as of October 2006 is $20.00US and Pro for $400.
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. Gmail shook up the free, web-based email market by initially offering 1 GB of email storage, prompting competitors Yahoo! and Hotmail to increase their storage quotas considerably. Google has since expanded Gmail's mail quota (and continues to expand it); as of November, 2006, the quota was over 2.78 GB. The service generates revenue by displaying advertisements from the AdWords service that are tailored to the content of the email messages displayed on screen. This feature has proven controversial, with some privacy advocates expressing concern that the company was reading individual emails. Google maintains, however, that the process is fully automated and that no humans read the content of users' 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. <ref>Needleman, Rafe. "Google Apps for Your Domain." ZDNet. August 29, 2006. Retrieved on August 31, 2006</ref>
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.
See also
- elgooG – a mirror version of Google
- Googlebot - Google's Web crawler
- Googlepedia
- Google and privacy issues
- Google China - Chinese subsidiary of Google Web search
- Google File System - Google's internal distributed file system
- Google Foundation - Charitable arm of Google
- Google logo
- Google search - Web search engine created by Google
- Google Watch
- TrustRank
References
Further reading
- David Vise and Mark Malseed (2005-11-15). The Google Story. Delacorte Press. ISBN 0-553-80457-X.
- John Battelle (2005-09-08). The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Portfolio Hardcover. ISBN 1-59184-088-0.
External links
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Chairman/CEO - Eric E. Schmidt | Technology President - Sergey Brin | Products President - Larry E. Page | CFO - George Reyes
Major products
Search: Books • Finance • Froogle • Images • Maps • News • Scholar • Video • Web
Advertising: AdSense • AdWords • Analytics
Communication & Publishing: Blogger • Calendar • Docs & Spreadsheets • Gmail • Groups • JotSpot • Page Creator • Orkut • YouTube
Computer Applications: Desktop • Earth • Hello • Pack • Picasa • SketchUp • Talk • Toolbar
Corporate information
Google acquisitions • History of Google • Privacy Issues • Google China
Stock Symbol: (NASDAQ: GOOG), (LSE: GGEA) • Annual Revenue: Image:Green Arrow Up.svg$7.14 billion USD (2006)
Employees: 9,378 (September 30, 2006) • Website: www.google.com
Hardware companies: Acer - Alcatel-Lucent - AMD - ASUS - Cisco - Dell - Freescale - Infineon - Intel - Juniper Networks - Matsushita - Motorola - NXP - Philips - Samsung - Sony - STMicroelectronics - Texas Instruments - Toshiba -VIA Technologies
Software companies: CA - Microsoft - Oracle - SAP - Adobe
Hardware/software companies: Apple - EMC - Fujitsu - HP - Hitachi - IBM - NEC - Nokia - Sun - Siemens - Thomson
Dot-com Companies: Amazon.com - AOL - eBay - Google - Yahoo!
Technology Consulting companies: Accenture - Infosys - Wipro - CSC - TCS - Satyam - EDS - Cognizant - Capgemini - LogicaCMG
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