Success of Google A Study In the words of Thomas Freidman, world has seen three major revolutions and the latest revolution is unmistakably the Internet revolution. It is changing the way we work in today s globalize environment that made Google tick. Very surprisingly most of the veered predictions about Interned in late 90 s have come true and the way we use the web is changing constantly. Initial version of Google came into existence in 1998 and its rise to dominance in the search business came about for a number of reasons. The main reason for Google s success is their search algorithm, which offered a unique inside document search. More importantly the relevance of search results to the user as well as the demands and sophistication of the Internet users in raising the standards of onlining. Google s USP The USP of Google is they have found a way to generate revenue from advertisement with out making it obtrusive like other service providers. This is something the big-banner portals are only now starting to realize. It has changed the way we shop, travel and get basic information about our economic and cultural climates. Perhaps the most fundamental difference since those early days is an enormous change in the usefulness and credibility of what one can find on the Internet.
Scaling up in Google search Plenty of people who want their Web sites to be listed near the top of Google search results have already figured out how to use Google's algorithm its logic for getting results to their own advantage. So the algorithm evolves, creating a Google Darwinism. Unfortunately as with all good things, Web has its evil side where one finds every kind of fraud, deceit, obscenity and insanity. But the Internet has also turned into a stunningly important archive of documents of all kinds, partly because it is now so easily searchable. The Web has moved from the periphery of a good researcher's awareness in 1998 to the very center of it in 2004. In doing so, it confirmed what has always been true, that a good researcher is also a skeptical researcher. Internet, the Information Highway The essence of Google business is the spurt and growth of Web to almost unimaginable proportions. It would not have come into existence if the Internet was not that a popular tool for business. But the Web is now a haystack full of needles. Once Google's motto might have been "Seek and ye shall find." Now it's really "Find and ye shall seek again." Google successfully reflected our changing sense of the dynamism of the Web. Nothing captures how statically we used to see the Internet as well as "information highway." That stasis is also captured in the increasingly outmoded notion of an Internet portal like AOL, much of whose dynamism comes from offering a Google search bar. The fact is that many of us have grown comfortable within the amorphousness of the Web. We no longer need a breakwater like AOL when a good search engine promises to make the sea itself our home.
Introducing new services Google was never complacent with its success and consistently explored new technologies and found new ways and things to search. Some of the other services introduced are Google Earth to telescopic view of mother Earth; Froogle that morphed into a shopping engine offering catalog search, product search showing rates and suggesting nearest location where one can buy etc. it also offers news search service. It boosts of indexing over 4 billion web pages and adding / updating every week. The best metaphor for the Internet seems to be the population of earth itself. As projected every human being will be identified by an IP address (Internet protocol) and stand out as one web page linking and conversing with all other web pages on earth. Whatever the metaphor, the only certainty is that we're going to need help finding anything for a long time yet to come. Time Line March 1995: Google co-founders, Sergey Brin from Moscow and Larry Page from Michigan, meet at a spring gathering of new Stanford University Ph.D. computer science candidates. January 1996-December 1997: Brin and Page create BackRub, the precursor to the Google search engine. September 1998: Google is incorporated and takes up residence in a Menlo Park, Calif., garage with four employees, after Brin and Page put their studies on hold and raised $1
Million in funding from family, friends and "angel" investors. Google answers 10,000 search queries per day. The company's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Brin and Page are 24 and 25 years old, respectively. February-June 1999: Google receives $25 million in funding from venture capital funds Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Sequoia's Michael Moritz, Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr and angel investor Ram Shriram join Google's board. May-June 2000: Google, answering 18 million search queries a day, becomes the largest search engine. Internet media company Yahoo picks Google as its default search results provider. March-April 2001: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell and a former CTO at Sun Microsystems, joins Google as chairman. July-August 2001: Schmidt is appointed CEO while Page becomes president, products and Brin president, technology. Nov.-Dec2001: Google boosts the size and scope of searchable information through its search engine to 3 billion Web documents. Jan-Feb 2002: Google begins selling its enterprise search appliance, a hardware and software product that helps companies and organizations find information within corporate intranets. March-April 2002: Google launches a beta version of Google News, which provides news stories from numerous global providers.
May-August 2002: Google opens offices in Paris, adding to operations in London, Toronto, Hamburg and Tokyo. George Reyes, a former Sun Microsystems executive, joins the company as chief financial officer. Google and Time Warner's AOL unit announce search and advertising pact. September-October 2002: Google rolls out its keyword advertising program worldwide, making it available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan. Nov.-December 2002: Google launches a beta version of Froogle, a search engine that helps users search for millions of products on the Web. January-February 2003: Google acquires Pyra Labs, creator of the Web self-publishing tool Blogger. March-April 2003: The Company announces its content-targeted advertising program and the acquisition of Applied Semantics. May-June 2003: Google launches AdSense, an advertising program that delivers ads based on the content of Web sites. February 2004: Yahoo begins rolling out its own Web search technology, phasing out Google's offering. March 31, 2004: Google announces its free e-mail service, Gmail, supported by advertising. The move came amid increasing competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, which have built strong user bases around free e-mail, and are attacking Google's main search business.
April 15, 2004: Online retailer Amazon.com unveils a test version of its own Web search service, dubbed A9, which incorporates Google's search technology. April 29, 2004: Google files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to sell as much as $2.7 billion in stock in an initial public offering. The company said it would seek to list on either the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange