Google

Google's philosophy combines  what makes the success of Microsoft and Apple combined: Like Microsoft  it takes on his own all the products that have success, but like Apple gives them an intuitive user interface. And it is characterized by free, products being financed by advertising.

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.


In 1988, 3600 windows were replaced in the future building of Google.

The two students proposed their site to Excite, a leading search engines at the time, that has found no interest in it, and that prompted them to pursue their own business.
In early 1999, Page and Brin have had serious discussions with George Bell, the CEO who has rejected an offer to buy Google for $ 1 million. They then discussed with Vinod Khosla to Offer $ 750,000, also refused. Google is worth 170 billion in 2010.
Who remembers Excite?

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 Adsense, its democratic advertising system allowing any website to earn income thanks to its contents.

New management

On April 4, Larry Page, a cofounder of Google replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO. What has changed since then:

Steve Jobs had a mission, shortly before his death, to advise the leaders of other computer companies.
He advised Page to significantly reduce the number of products. Apple has little products,  5 products and its succeeds much.
The council was followed as that can be verified in the obituary of websites. Google has closed a number of sites and services.

Google products? Search, mail, mobile OS, social network, cartography, online apps (Docs), video, netbook OS, programming languages, news, mobile manufacturer, driverless car.

Statistics

Results for the first quarter 2010:

Despite these significant revenues, Google only pays 2.4% tax on its profits, thanks to a very wise monetary circuit, also used by other companies such as Facebook. It is headquartered in Ireland with a low taxation, but that's not enough, revenues are actually reported in the Cayman Islands. Some European states are heavily taxing the transfer of funds to these countries, which is not the case of the Netherlands, also Google's funds are they transferred from Ireland to the Netherlands (there is no tax between European states) and from the Netherlands to the Cayman Islands.

Servers

Search engines market shares in USA in 2011

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.

140 questions to answer to become Google employee.

Four social categories

Google employees are classified into four social classes which are distinguished by a badge of one color.

Autonomous business units

The Autonomous Business Units would be an idea from Google to fight against the departure of the engineers who are tired of bureaucracy that has developed over time and prevents them to develop their projects.
Departments to which the ABU status is given do not need the approval of management to launch a site, sign a contract.
Although Google has not officially communicated on the subject (memos circulated though), we see the effect of this measure in fact with the multiplication of initiatives implemented through Web sites (see sites from Google).

Google anatomy, thumbnail

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 Bing with around 60% of Worldwide queries.
But beyond the search engine, Google has also experimental projects. Custom Search in particular allows to create its own engine on Google's index. The Google Anatomy, the architecture of the engine.
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 is used by Adsense and Admob for mobiles.
The earth in 3D with Google Earth
Represents the planet in three dimensions, thanks to satellite supplied images. Earth 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 Youtube.
Ecological Foundation
Google.org wants to promote ecology and particularly cleaner energies.
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.

Software and frameworks

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 OS
A system for web applications only.
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.
Go and Dart
Programming language for system developpers and web apps. See Go and Dart.

Google against the rest of the World

To each successful business on the web, Google is trying to oppose a similar service.

Competitor Google Result
Yahoo! Google Search Success
Overture Adsense Success
Hotmail Gmail Success
Friendster Orkut Fail
Firefox/IE Chrome Success
Facebook Google+ Success
Groupon Offers ?
Wikipedia Knol Fail
Paypal Checkout Fail
Yelp Places ?
iOS Android Success
Windows Chrome OS ?

But there are also areas where it is Google the precursor: Maps, Earth. And where it is copied by Microsoft. Another success is Youtube, bought from another enterprise.
Google+ comes after Orkut and Buzz that failed.

For now, Paypal, Craiglist, Digg and Amazon are missing in the list of targets and the field of games where Microsoft is successful.

Hardware

Google entered the mobile market on January 5, 2009 with the Nexus One superphone, running Android 2.1, followed by Nexus S. 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. 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.

Building in New York

Google acquired the Port Authority building in New York for $ 1.9 million (picture top right), of which it was previously tenant with several other firms. It is located at 111 8th Ave and it is placed just over a fiber optic network.
It is 3 millions square feet that is a 1 million more than the Empire State Building. It takes 20 minutes to walk around the building.

The headquarters remains the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

Google and social networking

The site Orkut has only local popularity in Brazil and Buzz, which wanted to integrate social features to Gmail was a total failure. Why? The answer in a picture ...

Google later took up the problem from a new angle, mimicking Facebook with improvements which resulted Google+ and the result was very different.

Google and the law

The Foundem case

Foundem and two other firms backed by Microsoft complained to the European Commission to have been removed from Google's search results.
These are price comparison sites and Google decided to penalize those sites that only redirect on other sites.

FTC investigation

Investigation for abuse of dominant position has been launched by the Federal Trade Commission in July 2011. In the worst case this can lead to the dismantling of the company, which is unlikely.

These are many complaints from businesses that feel aggrieved by the practices of search engine that are the source of the survey, which reached the U.S. after the equivalent in Europe.
The main complaint about Google is it does not apply the same rules to its services as competing services, so they arrive at the top of the results whatever they do.
And as the company diversifies more and more, the malcontents are becoming more numerous.

See also

Services

References