Google

At Mountain View, California, is the headquarters of the main Web company. Google is not only a search engine, but also a multitude of services and mainly the monetization of sites and blogs, but also technologies available to Webmasters.
Its objective is: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". With that well defined philosophy: "The work should be a challenge, and the challenge should be fun."

History

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google September 7, 1998 with more than a million dollars of funds. They had previously registered the domain name on September 15, 1997. They were students at Stanford University and started the engine as a research project in 1994. It was a program called BackRub who felt the importance of sites by the number of links pointing on them. The first patent on the PageRank was filed in September 2001.
The company would be called Googol, for a number of pages with 100 zeros, but the domain name was already in use.
The success of the search engine on competitors comes partly from the clean home page, and partly from the PageRank algorithm, which was providing more accurate results.
But the fortune of the company comes mainly from its democratic advertising system allowing any website to earn income thanks to its contents.

Statistics

Results for the first quarter 2010:

Other data:

Search engines market shares worldwide in 2010 

Google 85% 
Yahoo 6% 
Bing 3,4%

Reference Google.

Google and its employees

The Fortune magazine named it No. 1 on the list of 100 companies where it is good to work.
Google employs 16,000 people worldwide in September 2007.
400 members of the staff are assigned to recruiting and read 3500 CV per day.
It will take between 10 and 20 hiring interviews before being hired.
For a programmer, the salary would be $7000 per month.

At Mountain View, the Googleplex is a set of buildings where recreation centers occupy an important space. A similar complex is located in New York, another in Michigan, others are under construction, not counting the many offices and processing centers in the world. These complexes have the largest solar panels in the United States.

To its engineers, Google gives one day a week to work on personal projects. This gave birth to Orkut, Gmail, and many other services.

Web services

New services are developed by Google Labs, others come from buyout, and then once acquired, almost all become free.

Search engine

Google is the most used search engine before Yahoo and Microsoft Live with 57% of requests. In France it represents 90% of all searches.
But beyond the search engine, Google has also experimental projects. Custom Search in particular allows to create its own engine on Google's index.

Automated translation

Unlike other programs that make a grammatical and semantics analysis of sentences, Google uses the texts in several languages in its index, and take infos on these translations to translate the proposed text.

Gmail

Online messaging service with an effective spam filtering and which can be augmented with other services, including research in emails.

Advertisement

The principle of this system of cost per click or views, based on keywords bids had been invented by Goto.com that then became Overture. For details, see How Adsense works.

The earth in 3D with Google Earth

Represents the planet in three dimensions, thanks to satellite supplied images. Contains a flight simulator and a driving simulator.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine est a free hosting for Web application. It is intended to help startups to build easily a website that combines other Google services such as Maps.

Sharing videos

With Google videos followed by the takeover of Youtube which would have 100 million video views per day.

Ecological Foundation

Google.org wants to promote ecology and particularly cleaner energies.

Blogger

Blog hosting.

Toolbar

The toolbar adds functions to browsers, and can interact with Gmail and Blogger in particular.

Webmaster tools

Administering panel to monitor and improve SEO of sites of a webmaster. Displays statistics, backlinks, and offers diagnostic tools.

Analytics

This statistical JavaScript tool goes far beyond what can do software installed on servers, the data include bounce factor and displays the percentage of clicks on each link in a page by visitors.

Google Website Optimizer

Online tool to help optimizing a website. Several versions of a page can be tried and the opinion of users can be obtained. Tutorials and demos are available.

All the sites of Google.

Software and frameworks

Google Pack

A set of tools to download. This includes the Star Office desktop suite, Picasa, a virus checker, and so on. See the
list of programs in the Google Pack beside Star Office.

Chrome

Browser aimed at improving processing of web applications.
Chrome.

Android

It is an operating system and a user interface for mobile phones.
A Java API is provided to enable the development of applications.

Google Labs is a service which is testing and developing new technologies.

Maps

Free Web service and collaborative cartography. Thanks to the API it is possible to combine maps and services, thus making it possible to locate them.

Web Toolkit

The Google Web Toolkit is an Ajax and Java framework to create Web applications. For dedicated hosting.

All the tools and services from Google.

Hardware

Google entered the mobile market on January 5, 2009 with the Nexus One superphone, running Android 2.1. Other devices are planned including a tablet running Chrome OS.

Patents for identifying users

Google is able to determine the age, sex, reading level, subjects of interest to users based on behavior observed from the toolbar and other ways (in search results in particular).

Google has introduced a new patent to help display ads in papers based on topics of interest to users ((Rendering advertisements with documents having one or more topics using user topic interest).
This is not the first patent in this vein, as previously materialized patent the invention of a method for finding information on the user to use it to target ads. (Generating user information for use in targeted advertising). This ongoing process of validation would also determine the age, level of reading and other data based on user behavior.

The main purpose of the implementation of these inventions is to better target advertisements to the interests of Internet users, however this information should also be used to identify fraud by abusive publishers of the Adsense program that penalize advertisers.

Presumably, other engines and boards are trying to use similar methods.

Source Slashdot.

Future of the search engine

Among the trends of development of the search engine, note the filing of a patent for suggestion about the development by webmasters.
The patent describes techniques for identifying the topics on which users can not find an answer. This may based on statistics.
Then the patent envisages different ways to let know these weaknesses to webmasters who seek ideas for developing their contents. Among the means, creating stubas in a wiki, or selling the information to subscribers of a service. Google will then shift from the role of content provider to that of conductor of Web development.

Source.

References

(c) 2009 Scriptol.com