Google project November 2007

This project it was an interesting idea where i explored and learn everything about Google.

GOOGLE

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Through this project we can have a full icon about the company Google. As we can see Google have done a lot of things to be one of the important companies in the world. Through Google you can do a lot of things and you can advertise anything you want. Google as a company have earn a lot of money through advertising as we can see in the next pages and as things is going it will earn more in the future as the history informed as.
But a big company have a lot of strengths and weaknesses. Strengths like is the king of search-related advertising, and search-related ads are the fastest growing sector of the online ad business, which is growing at 41% annually and weaknesses like it do not have stable group of clients. Also Google have very good opportunities in the market though new services and search engines. Moreover as a company has some threats but this is life. Finally as we can see Google have raised social criticism in terms of the freedom of speech for the reason we explain later.

Historical Background
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet search and online advertising. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has 15,916 full-time employees Google's mission statement is, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It is the largest American company that is not part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Google's corporate philosophy includes statements such as "Don't be evil" and "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun", illustrating a somewhat relaxed corporate culture.
Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.
In March 1998, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googolplex. In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million. The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and usability. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com. While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in the form of a USD100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist. Around six months later, a much larger round of funding was announced, with the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised $1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of August 9, 2004, ten days before the IPO. Google's post-IPO stock performance has been very good as well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007, due to strong sales and earnings in the advertising market, as well as the release of new features like the desktop search function and personalized home page. The surge in stock price is fueled primarily by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.
Growth
While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has begun to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Acquisitions
Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies, often consisting of innovative teams and products. One of the earlier companies that Google bought was Pyra Labs. They were the creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform, first launched in 1999. This acquisition led to many premium features becoming free. Pyra Labs was originally formed by Evan Williams, yet he left Google in 2004. In early 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online word processor, Writely. The technology in this product was used by Google to eventually create Google Docs & Spreadsheets. In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog statistics application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled. The last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on April 6, 2006 and outlined many of the service's known issues. In late 2006, Google bought online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Shortly after, on October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed to buy the company for $3.1 billion. On July 9, 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.

Partnerships
In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government agencies to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames Research Center to build up 1,000,000 square feet of offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google also entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company entered into a partnership with Time Warner's AOL, to enhance each other's video search services. Also in 2005, the company became a major financial investor of the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, in conjunction with several other companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericcson, and others. In September of 2007, Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service to its publishing partners providing the ability to monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads, and acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi, to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google applications, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mobile devices. Finally, in 2006 2006, Google and News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site, MySpace.

Strengths
• Google is king of search-related advertising, and search-related ads are the fastest growing sector of the online ad business, which is growing at 41% annually
• The extreme Pragmatism layout is very impressive to people: extreme simple web page, no display advertisings, no cartoon pictures, all the advertisings are text style, and these kinds of advertising only appear in 15% search result pages.
• Google has a competitive advantage on translating; Google can search over 50 language web sits, and the software that can handle 26 kinds of language.
• Google pay great attention on discovering new wireless application. Google has become the two big laptop brand (handspring and palm) Default search engine. Besides that, Google has signed a cooperation contract with Vodafone of Europe and DoCoMo of Japan.
• The Technical staff are currently investigating the voice searching system with BMW of Germany
• Google has advantages on search calculating and hardware improvement. The listing of Google search is based on Page Rank technology; this technology lists the items by its frequency of clicking and importance. Every single search result is based on the computer technology, which confirmed the advantage on technique, and Google has 70 Billions cash used in investing on new technologies.
• Google has almost twice as many search ad click-through as runner-up Yahoo. In December, Google had 16.5 trillion ads clicks-through, compared with Yahoo's 9 trillion, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings.
• Google earned $3.64 billion from U.S. online ad revenues in 2005, representing 69% of all paid search advertising, according to e Marketer.
• Google's market cap, now hovering at around $132 billion, is bigger than IBM and Chevron.
• The stock would likely soar past $600 this year.
• Google has a war chest of $7.6 billion for doing whatever it pleases.
• Google is one of the top 10 Web brands in the U.S., and the second-fastest-growing Web site, building traffic 29% in the past year. Only Apple's Web site is more popular; Yahoo and MSN lag far behind.
Weaknesses
• Too dependant on search based advertising.99 percent of its revenues come from search-related advertising. The remaining 1 percent comes from sales of its enterprise search appliance
• Stymied by its own success: Whether they like it or not, they are a media company," said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner. "What they provide is very valuable aspects of media, all wrapped up in search. But they're missing the internal talent and internal capability to think like a media company. Everything is from a technology perspective, and that is a real shortcoming."
• The limitation of the location. Google head office is in the US, but there is over 50& of its revenue came from other countries
• The internal management structure of Google is very breakable. The perspectives between the new CEO and the Founder have some differences. They are more likely a group which is chasing the dream but not a profit-orientated organization. The larger Google growth in the future, the more obvious of the weakness shows up.
• Google does not have a stable group of clients.
• “Loss” on media advertising. Display advertising, keywords advertising, sponsor advertising and infomercial advertising are the unforgettable market for internet ad organizations. By these advertising strategies, Yahoo! Increased 39% revenue in 2004, which is about 8.57 billion dollar, but Google in this filed almost nothing significant.
• The orientation is not diversified, only search engine. Although, Google is keep on searching for new fields, none of them has competitive advantages, and also, the recruitment is similar to Microsoft, but there is no competitability to Microsoft.
Opportunities
Market trends
The market in the field of search engines has rapidly expanded since its inception. Today’s engines provide significantly more than internet directory and searching services. Google being the leader in this market expansion, has discovered and launched a huge number of new services revolving around the concept of an integrated, internet desktop environment.
The latter concept includes a set of services that go well beyond the scope of a search engine, or a remote web site, providing the user of new remote opportunities such as:
• To manage and host his own web page
• To manage, publish, and host remotely personal photo albums.
• To remotely use popular application such as spreadsheets and word processors.
• Have customized access to news from thousand news sources around the world.
• Maintain or even publish his own diary online
New services are being developed and researched daily that focus on extending the capabilities of desktop computers over the Internet. A list of the most promising experimental technologies in that area would include
• Taxi and shuttle ride finding options with the help of a map.
• Accessibility to the internet with people with disability problems.
• Statistical searches for public trends in music or other popular topics.
Search engines derive most of their revenues from advertising. Using today’s technology, advertisements within the search engine domain come in the form of link ranking and banners. More personalized services though, offer new ways that advertisers can deliver their message to the public. Such technologically advanced services can be exploited financially from Google in order to provide access to even more niche markets for advertisers and product vendors.
Technology
Technology is becoming more and more personalized. This fact allows parties with financial interests, unrestricted access to even more niche markets. Product vendors have more credible data regarding people’s trends which allows them to create more refined ways to approach customers.
Google has always been a leader in its field and still is well ahead of its competitors in terms of technological features. Typically, large search engines follow the footsteps of Google, trying to approach the company’s extensive services. There are very few services that engines such as Yahoo or MSN provide which do not exist in Google. The most important of those are messaging capabilities, using a custom messaging product. In this area MSN is the most popular with the MSN messenger having the largest number of downloads by end users.
Another service that has was always around but now is starting to integrate with search engines, has to do with the music market. Microsoft, having the advantage of being the number one provider of operating systems, used this fact for MSN. Taking into account that every workstation that has Windows installed has also the windows media player, Microsoft integrated into its search engine.
Threats

Expansion of competitors
Although being the leader, Google constantly researches new technologies to launch to the public. This has a direct relation with the rapid advancement of Google’s competitors. Most interesting services that can be found in Google today are most likely to be integrated in other search engines in the short term future if not yet having so.
In this area, Microsoft has the strategic advantage of being the company that besides internet services offers the most popular operating system platform. In this way, Microsoft is being competitive not only by issuing new services but also integrating them into the native workstation environment leveraging accessibility, usability and remote access.
A typical example of how Microsoft can pose a possible threat in the future is the launch of Microsoft map, a service similar to Google maps. Microsoft provides to the user about the same service however it goes a step forwards. Having the asset of producing windows, it integrates this service directly to the operating system, thus providing higher accessibility to the user that Google is.
Criticism by outsiders
Recent developments in Google have raised social criticism by some public in terms of the freedom of speech as well as the protection of sensitive personal information.
Since its foundation in 2005, Google China announced its intent to comply with Internet censorship laws in the People's Republic of China. This included the access blocking of a list of specific web sites that included censored content according to the PRC government. This issue, publicly known also as the “Golden Shield Project”, has been the focus of controversy over many critics. Google’s justification against the criticism was focused on the fact that it could play a more useful part to the cause of free speech by participating in China's IT industry than by refusing to comply and being denied admission to the Chinese market.
Another issue that has been raising public criticism is the fact that Google’s rapid developments combined with the exceptionally large volume of information could at some cases prove harmful to the individual privacy. One such case was a service provided form the Penn State law enforcement that was realized with the assistance of a Google technology called Google maps. This service provided information about the whereabouts of registered sexual offenders over that area. This information, which in European countries is considered personal and thus its propagation to the public is prohibited, was taken from the state police records.

Work Cited
• http://www.google.com Main site of Google
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google About Google
• http://labs.google.com/refinder An experimental a highly promising technology from Google.
• http:maps.google.com A very popular service of Google
• http:www.yahoo.com/ Main site of Yahoo
• http:www.msn.com Main site of Microsoft