Google

HISTORY

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It first started in January 1996 as a research project when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.

While the conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, Page and Brin pictured a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank. It determines a website’s relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

Page and Brin original nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub,” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, coming from a misspelling of the word “googol.” At first, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.

EXPANSION

Google was granted a patent for its PageRank mechanism. Overtime, Google found its way into everyday language. The verb, “google,” was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, noted as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.”

Google also expanded by acquiring many companies. Google focused on small venture capital companies.

Click here for a list of Google acquisitions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Some major acquisitions include: Google purchased Earth Viewer that gave a 3-D view of the Earth. Google later on renamed it Google Earth. Another example, Google purchased GrandCentral and it is later changed over to Google Voice.

Google also partnered with other organizations ranging from research to advertising. One area of expertise was mobile device. Google launched “Adsense for Mobile,” taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.

ADVERTISING

99% of Google’s revenue is generated from its advertising programs. With the technology aquired from the company DoubleClick, Google can determine user interests and target advertisements so they are relevant to their context and the users. Google Analytics allows website owners to track wehre and how people use their websites, for example, looking at click rates for all the links on one page.

Google’s AdWords allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. It’s sibiling device, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their websites, and earn money every time ads are clicked.

SEARCH ENGINE

Google Search is the company’s most popular service. Google links to billions of web pages. Users can search for the information they need by typing keywords. Google Search provides at least 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. There are special features for numbers, including ranges, prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions, calculations, package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages.

Google’s homepage also includes a button called “I’m Feeling Lucky.” When a user clicks on the button, the user will be taken directly to the first search result. The idea is so the user could be taken to the perfect result without going through the search results. However, it is “I’m Feeling Lucky” button has retired due to the introduction of Google Instant searching.

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

Google also released many online productivity tools. Gmail, a free webmail service was made available to the general public on Feb. 7^th, 2007. The service currently offers over 7400 MB of free storage space.

Google Docs is also another part of Google’s productivity suite. It allows users to create, edit, and share documents in an online environment, very similar to Microsoft Word. The suite includes word document, presentation, spreadsheet, form and drawing.

GOOGLE PRODUCTS

Along with its most famous search engine, Google also has a series of products such as desktop, mobile and online products.

- Google Chrome-web browser available in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

- Google Desktop-desktop search application that indexes emails, documents, music, photo, chats, web history and other files.

- Google Earth-virtual 3D globe that uses satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS.

- Gmail-free, advertising-supported webmail.

- Quick search box-a search box that allows easily viewing installed applications or performing online searches.

- SketchUp-Modeling application to sketch simple 3D structures.

- Google talk-application for instant messaging.

- Google images-image search application

- Visigami-image search application screen saver that searches files from Google images, Picasa and Flickr.

MOBILE

Google also collaborated with multiple phone companies to create Google phones. Many of the features on Google phones are linked back to each user’s personal account. Many of these features include Buzz, calendar, gmail, etc.

REFERENCES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products