Innovative Processes at Google Search Engine - Case Study Example

?Google Search Engine Executive Summary: Google’s search engine has been successful as a result of its heavy investment in infrastructure, qualified personnel and its use of innovative programs. It uses computers in parallel while searching for files to ensure optimization and speed up the retrieval process. The billions of indexed pages are searched using keywords that the users input. The results of these searches are displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) through the trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns a relevancy score to each Web page based on the input. The MapReduce system indexes the pages that are later used to present information to the users and has been a major contributor to the success of the company. In September, 1998 a company named Google Inc. was launched in a garage by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They initially started working in their friend’s garage and within a span of just one year moved to an office with 8 employees. In 2004, Google was able to raise a massive sum of $1.67 billion dollars through its Initial Public Offering (IPO). (Schneider, 2012) It was a highly publicized event that caught everyone’s attention. As of now, Google has more than 20,000 employees worldwide that are stationed in various parts of the world, making sure that the company operates to provide its customers with valued services. The first international office of Google was opened in Tokyo, Japan in August 2001. This was a sign of how technology has shifted from west to east in the past decade. Far East is considered to be one of the most tech-savvy regions of the world and the big minds at Google capitalized on this opportunity and went straight to Japan for their international expansion. (Google, 2012) In the same year as its IPO, it opened its R&D (Research and Development) centre in Japan to attract the brightest, innovative and qualified engineers from amongst the Japanese and other Asian countries. In 2007, Android was announced as the first open source platform for mobile devices. In January 2010, Nexus One was the first phone introduced by Google as its benchmark phone that was equipped with the Android operating software and enabled new dimensions for mobile phone users. (Google, 2012) Google’s mission statement from the very first day has been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Schneider, 2012). It specializes in Internet Search, cloud computing and advertising technologies. Amongst its most famous products include Gmail (email service) and Google+ (a social networking service). Google Chrome, Picasa (photo organizing) and Android mobile operating system have been its recent success that has helped it take over the technological world. It has been roughly estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world. (Pandia, 2007) The huge success rate of Google can be attributed to an intricate set of innovative processes. The “science driven PageRank algorithm” has generated excellent search results that have been able to attract millions of searches on a regular basis. Google has reported that it spends approximately 200 to 250 million US dollars annually on purchasing or revamping its IT equipment. (Pandia, 2007) This shows the extent to which Google is committed in improving its infrastructure to provide the most latest and up-to date services to its customers. Peter Hidas of the Gartner Group has concluded that based on the above figures Google is roughly the fourth largest server producer in the world trailing behind HP, Dell and IBM. He even went on to say that Google has surpassed Microsoft’s total servers, signifying the fact that Google has the capacity and ability to handle excessively large number of computers in parallel. Its technical solution has been a result of continuous innovation and thus is far ahead of its competitors. (Pandia, 2007) According to estimates by some Google engineers, Google is processing a massive sum of 20,000 terabytes of data on a daily basis. This can be translated into 20 petabytes of data and is the sole reason why the Google search engine has a competitive advantage over its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft. (Schonfeld, 2008) In 2003, Google successfully converted its search indexing systems to the MapReduce system. A 2008 report states that an average MapReduce job runs on $1 million hardware equipment, and this clearly does not take into account the various expenses such as bandwidth fees, datacenter costs or staffing in general. (Kennedy, 2008) Google Inc. is currently the proud owner of 6 data centers located across the US, along with one located each in Finland and Belgium. All these are operational and provide great support to the success of the company. Great news from Google came when they announced that they are focusing on building three additional data centers in Asia. These centers would be located in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan and would incur a cost of more than $200 million for its setup and operation. If everything goes according to plan, the time frame for their operation has been set to one to two years. (Chan, 2011) This is owing to the huge data usage and generation in the Asian countries which have seen immense growth in the Information System industry. As internet becomes more and more accessible in developing countries, Google would be able to penetrate more in households and would need huge investments to handle such massive amounts of data. Google claims that it is currently using its existing data centers efficiently and causes minimal wastage of resources. It also claims that its data centers are environment friendly and states that its $272 million Finnish facility is located inside an old paper mill that is equipped with the latest high-tech state of the art cooling system that makes use of the nearby seawater. This saves up cost for the company and processes the freely available seawater without having to waste any freshwater for cooling purposes. (Chan, 2011) The Google Search Engine is the most widely used search engine in the United States. The market research carried out by comScore in November 2009 shed light onto the company’s dominant success in the United States where it had an outstanding market share of 65.6%. (comScore, 2009) The research published by comScore highlighted the fact that in November 2009, nearly 14.4 billion core searches were conducted by the Americans, out of which the Google Sites accounted for 65.6% of the search market share. This was a mere 0.2% increase compared to the previous month. (comScore, 2009) Google’s algorithm gives more weight to high-quality content that is often not spun and would meet the requirements of the customers. It has often come under criticism that it gives more priority to already well established sites as compared to new sites. The most basic reason being that already accessed sites are more credible and give more reliable data that previous users have already used and found it useful. Therefore, substantiating it on credit worthiness old established sites are given preference over newer ones. According to rumors the company spent an estimated $3.8 billion over the past seven quarters to buy dark fiber to help connect its data centers across the world. (Malik, 2007) These huge capital expenditures are a great reason for its success in the way it manages and organizes its information as the huge infrastructure enables it to process data in just seconds. A random search on Google takes only between 0.06 to 0.12 seconds, a visible sign of how fast and readily accessible the information is. (Malik, 2007) All that matters to the consumer is the time it takes to retrieve and search the information which the Google’s infrastructure makes sure happens within a few milliseconds. This ensures that the present consumers don’t switch to rival search engines since their purpose is being served by the timely and mostly relevant searches of Google. The cost of executing a query has been immensely reduced owing to the heavy investment in high end infrastructure which has turned into a great strategic advantage for Google. Information is one of the most vital element in the decision making process. People increasingly are going to online search engines to find better and more reliable information to be better equipped with the relevant information and then take more wise and accountable decisions within their organizations. This trend has provided a great opportunity for search engine giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to develop their information system. Nevertheless, the reason why Google has surpassed their nearest rivals by almost 4 times the market share is because of its high investment in technology and infrastructure and also because it indexes billions of pages like no one else and makes them available for viewing with only one touch of a button. (comScore, 2009) The faster processing, somewhat accurate retrieval and all sources of information enable it to maintain the top position in the search engine industry. Google gives equal emphasis on its diverse and highly competent workforce, which is a driving force in implementing such a massive system. This parallel run system is made successful only by the people who implement, operate and monitor it and ensure that the users on the other end don’t go through any interruption in the service. (Carr, 2006) The MapReduce system accepts programming instructions and then assigns them to be promptly executed on several computers connected in parallel. This gives faster results with higher accuracy by ensuring the idle worker machines are used at all times and distributes the load evenly to ensure maximum capacity. (Carr, 2006) Google has redefined boundaries for information management and is a pioneer that is paving the way for the next generation of Web-centric businesses. Bibliography Carr, D. (2006, July 6). By synchronizing technology, Google keeps people and projects in sync. Retrieved from Baseline: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Networks-and-Storage/Managing-a-Global-Workforce/ Carr, D. (2006, July 6). How Google Works - How Google Works: Reducing Complexity. Retrieved from Baseline: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Infrastructure/How-Google-Works-1/5/ Chan, K. (2011, September 29). Google plans $200 million Asian data centers. Retrieved from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-09-29/google-asian-data-centers/50601694/1 comScore. (2009, December 16). comScore Releases November 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings. Retrieved from comScore: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/12/comScore_Releases_November_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings Google. (2012). Google history. Retrieved from Google: http://www.google.com/about/company/history.html Kennedy, N. (2008, January). Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day. Retrieved from Niallkennedy: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html Malik, O. (2007, December 4). Google's Infrastructure is its Strategic Advantage. Retrieved from Gigaom: http://gigaom.com/2007/12/04/google-infrastructure/ Pandia. (2007, July 2). Google: one million servers and counting. Retrieved from Pandia Search & Social: http://www.pandia.com/sew/481-gartner.html Schneider, L. (2012). Google - Overview, Company Culture and History. Retrieved from About.com: http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/companyprofiles/a/google.htm Schonfeld, E. (2008, January 9). Google Processing 20,000 Terabytes A Day, And Growing. Retrieved from Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/09/google-processing-20000-terabytes-a-day-and-growing/ Read More