Dr. Zack Jourdan
INFO 3700: Data Communication
24 July 2013
Google:
The History and Future “Google me” or “Google it” is not a verb but a company name used as a verb. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Dropout Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began Google as a research project in 1996 while attending California’s Stanford University. By developing a technology called page rank, they were able to create a search engine that could estimate a websites importance based on its incoming links. In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a webpage called Page Rank. Page Rank is complex mathematical algorithm that ranks a websites by their relevance. This groundbreaking technology profoundly transformed the access for information. Google rapid became the first choice for internet search, but this was just the beginning. The Google.com domain originally nicknamed “Backrub” was registered on September 15th, 1997 and the following year, the company incorporated on September 4th. Its initial public offering came on August 19, 2004, though the founders and then-CEO Eric Schmidt remained in control. Because of the IPO (Initial Public Offerings), many of the company’s employees became millionaires, and this led some to speculate if Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto could sustain for a long period. Google was first based out of a garage; today, its corporate headquarters is in Mountain View, California. Known as the Googleplex, the offices and environment perpetuate a causal, relaxing, and informal atmosphere for employees. Employees are encouraged and almost required to dedicate twenty percent of their work to personal interests, and this has led to the creation of services such as Google News and Ad Sense. Employees respond with better focus, and awareness to the goals that Google set. Partners of Google criticized this philosophy by requesting a CEO at the helm. However, the founders of Google denied the request and decided to keep the culture as it was. The most popular service that Google offers is it search engine, Google Search. Users utilize this tool to look for information by typing keywords into the search bar. Billions of results spew in from numerous web pages the company indexes, and the order of the results is partly based on the previously design Page Rank. Company like Bing challenges Google Search with campaigns to match and succeed Google’s efforts. But a correlation analysis of ranking elements presented by Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of blogger MOZ.com, shows that google has a slight edge over its competitor. Fishkin examined areas dimensions such as but not limited to One-Page keyword usage, website home page, length of domain, URL, & content, and many more. Each except for two illustrated that Google had a slight edge over Bing. The graph below illustrates one of the specific areas examined on boy Bing and Google.
Google has expanded its search results and paid listings onto other websites through AdSense. AdSense and AdWords form the engine of Google’s multi-billion dollar revenue machine. Google also offers marketers a free service called Google Analytics, which produces website visitor statistics. Thanks to its innovations, the company is now one of the one of the biggest brokers in the online advertising market.
Google Search has branched out to offer other types of services in many different languages as well. These include Google Image Search, Google Video Search, Google Maps and Google Translate. Google has also released several internet productivity tools. The most well-known of these is Gmail. Gmail was the first free webmail service to maintain emails from the same exchange collectively in a common thread. Gmail was also the first email service to provide user several gigabytes of free storage. Today Gmail offers a package of limitless storage for a small fee. All your e-mails