More than 7. 0 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California. Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 5. Internet services and products, from e- mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers.
In addition, its 2. Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high- tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success. In 2. 01. 1 Google earned 9.
Searching for business. Brin and Page, who met as graduate students at Stanford University, were intrigued with the idea of extracting meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room at Stanford to devise a new type of search technology, which they dubbed Back. Rub. The key was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each Web site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them.
Most search engines simply returned a list of Web sites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Brin and Page incorporated into the search function the number of links each Web site had; i. Web site with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than one with just a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities. Further, a link from a heavily linked Web site would be a more valuable “vote” than one from a more obscure Web site. In mid- 1. 99. 8 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing (one of their first investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc.). They ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, California, under the name Google, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number one followed by 1.
NeXT (later NeXT Computer and NeXT Software) was an American computer and software company founded in 1985 by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, based in Redwood. Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV Acquires Initial Tranche of Eight-Facility Northern California Senior Housing Portfolio. American National Standards Institute is a premier source for timely, relevant, actionable information on national, regional, international standards and conformity.
By mid- 1. 99. 9, when Google received a $2. Activity began to explode in 2. Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo! By 2. 00. 4, when Yahoo! That growth only continued: by the end of 2.
Google was handling some three billion searches per day. The company’s name became so ubiquitous that it entered the lexicon as a verb: to google became a common expression for searching the Internet. To accommodate this unprecedented mass of data, Google built 1. Google’s interlinked computers probably number several million.
The heart of Google’s operation, however, is built around three proprietary pieces of computer code: Google File System (GFS), Bigtable, and Map. Reduce. GFS handles the storage of data in “chunks” across several machines; Bigtable is the company’s database program; and Map. Reduce is used by Google to generate higher- level data (e. Web pages that contain the words “Chicago,” “theatre,” and “participatory”). Test Your Knowledge. Kings of England.
InformationWeek.com connects the business technology community. Award-winning news and analysis for enterprise IT.
The extraordinary growth of Google led to internal management problems. Almost from the beginning, investors felt that Brin and Page needed an experienced manager at the helm, and in 2. Eric Schmidt as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the company. Schmidt, who previously had held the same positions at the software company Novell Inc., had a doctorate in computer science and melded well with the technocratic impulses of the founders.
During Schmidt’s reign as CEO, Page served as president of products, and Brin was president of technology. The trio ran the company as a “triumvirate” until Page took on the CEO role in 2.
Established in 1992 and based in Austin Texas, Blue Moon Software has a long and successful track record in developing web-based forms processing solutions for the.
Schmidt became executive chairman, and Brin adopted the title of director of special projects. The company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2. Brin and Page instant billionaires. In fact, the IPO created 7 billionaires and 9.
The stock offering also made news because of the unusual way it was handled. Shares were sold in a public auction intended to put the average investor on an equal footing with financial industry professionals. Google was added to Standard and Poor’s 5. S& P 5. 00) stock index in 2.
In 2. 01. 2 Google’s market capitalization made it one of the largest American companies not in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Google reorganized itself in August 2. Alphabet Inc. Internet search, advertising, apps, and maps, as well as the mobile operating system Android and the video- sharing site You. Tube, remained under Google. Separate Google ventures—such as longevity research company Calico, home- products company Nest, and research lab Google X—became separate firms under Alphabet. Page became CEO of Alphabet, Brin its president, and Schmidt its executive chairman.
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products, became Google’s new CEO. Advertising growth.
Google’s strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google’s popularity in particular. Analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. For example, American newspaper advertising fell from a peak of $6. Britannica Lists & Quizzes. Since its founding, Google has spent large sums to secure what it has calculated to be significant Internet marketing advantages. For example, in 2. Google spent $1. 02 million to acquire Applied Semantics, the makers of Ad.
Sense, a service that signed up owners of Web sites to run various types of ads on their Web pages. In 2. 00. 6 Google again paid $1.
Web advertisement business, d. Marc Broadcasting, and that same year it announced that it would pay $9. My. Space. com. In 2. Google made its largest acquisition to date, buying online advertising firm Double. Click for $3. 1 billion. Two years later the company responded to the explosive growth of the mobile applications market with a $7.
Ad. Mob. All of these purchases were part of Google’s effort to expand from its search engine business into advertising by combining the various firms’ databases of information in order to tailor ads to consumers’ individual preferences. Other services. Google Video and You. Tube. Google’s expansion, fueled largely by keyword- based Web advertising, provided it with a sound footing to compete for dominance in new Web services. One of these was the delivery of video content. In January 2. 00. Google launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close- captioned text from television broadcasts.
A few months later Google began accepting user- submitted videos, with submitters setting the prices for others to download and view the videos. In January 2. 00. Google Video Store opened, featuring premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS Corporation (television shows) and Sony Corporation (movies).
In June 2. 00. 6 Google began offering premium content for free but with ads. For all of its marketing advantages, however, Google was unable to overtake the upstart leader in online videos, You. Tube. Following its introduction in 2. You. Tube quickly become the favourite site for users to upload small video files, some of which attracted millions of viewers. Unable to generate anything close to the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought You.
Tube in 2. 00. 6 for $1. Rather than merge the Web sites, however, Google continued You. Tube’s operation as a separate entity. Despite estimated revenues of more than $1 billion by 2. Google said You. Tube remained an “investment” and has not said whether the division was profitable.
Gmail. In 2. 00. 4 Google began offering a free Web- based e- mail account to select “beta” testers (a beta product being a product not yet in its final form). The service, known as Gmail, was opened to the general public in 2. One of the main appeals of Gmail was that it gave users an e- mail address that was independent of any particular Internet service provider (ISP), thus making it easier to maintain a permanent address. In addition, the service offered an unprecedented one gigabyte (one billion bytes) of free e- mail storage space, though users were also presented with advertisements based on keywords that the Google search engine found in their messages. Google later expanded the amount of free storage space given to users to seven gigabytes and allowed users to rent additional space. In 2. 00. 7 the company acquired Postini, an e- mail services firm, for $6. Gmail’s security, especially in Google’s efforts to sign up businesses.
In 2. 00. 9 Google removed the beta status of Gmail, increasing its appeal to business users. In January 2. 01. Google announced that it had detected a series of sophisticated hacking attacks, originating in China, that were directed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China. In some cases the accounts had been reconfigured to forward all incoming and outgoing e- mail to unfamiliar addresses. Google’s immediate response was to change Gmail’s protocol from the Web standard HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS, which increased security at the expense of speed. The attacks also led Google to threaten to reverse its stance, which allowed the Chinese government to censor its Google.
Chinese users to receive unfiltered search results. This brought the company into conflict with the Chinese government and raised the possibility of Google’s exiting the Chinese market altogether. In March, Google avoided direct conflict by automatically redirecting Chinese users of Google. Hong Kong site, Google. This arrangement continued until Google’s government- issued license to operate in China came up for annual renewal at the end of June. At that time Google changed Google.
Chinese site for services such as music search or manually click on a link to Google.