Google Innovation & Technology - Essay Example

 Google Innovation & Technology Innovation & Technology When someone talks about innovation the mind involuntarily makes one think about a change, a positive change, which can simplify things more for both the parties the one who has brought the innovation and the one who is using the innovated service, over the years there have been so many web services came in view and so many failed to satisfy the need of users and other web surfers but out of few successful services the one that changed the thinking and the surfing habits of an internet user in extremely positive way is named as “Google”. With having headquarters in California, Google is perhaps the most innovative of all the web sites and the proof is its versatility, it is one of the 5 most popular and well organized websites on the internet used by millions of people around the globe, “Google is the #1 search engine in the Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K., U.S. (Nielsen//Net Ratings 6/05, based on total number of unique visitors)”, 50 percent of the audience are from outside the United States and the company is having 5,680 full time employees working for the betterment of the company, over the years we have seen so many new services started by Google, such as Google Earth, G-Mail, G-Talk, Google Books, Google Cash, Google Desktop, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, and Google Maps. The services that Google is providing is exactly by putting the needs of the customers first, although every website claims to put there customers first but not the case with Google, which doesn’t offer anything that is not beneficial to the visitors/users, even the search engine is fast and easily loadable, it doesn’t advertise anything that can prove to be distracting the visitors/users and exactly the same way they have taken very good care of small things that can create more value in the eyes of visitors/users, the Google co-founder L. Page has said that “The perfect search engine [Google] would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want”, this is clearly showing the signs of highly innovated technology, as the matter of fact, it is Google’s goal to provide the visitors/users the information they seek in an absolute form. Google has gained success and popularity in an unusual way, they haven’t really done any advertisement of their own and also haven’t run any such campaigns, but their success and fame is from the word of mouth, just like from one person to another, another strange thing one can notice about google is the first online company who’s stated goal is to have its users leave its website as soon as possible, which means that they want every thing to work fast perhaps just on a click, the time taken by a query is even less than half a second, Google doesn’t rely on big servers in fact they claim to have networked PCs that made their work so fast and innovative, another good thing found in google is that it has used a “Page Rank” technology in their search engine, through this technology they are able to rank websites that are mostly visited by the users for the purpose of information through Google, another technology used by google is “Hypertext-Matching Analysis” according to which each word’s position and font and few other related things are detected, another interesting fact of Google is that it has advanced and innovated the technology at its paramount by making Google available at different devices other than computers, such as mobiles, palm PDAs, Japanese i-mode, j-sky and Ezweb devices, Google is also providing its wireless services to great market leaders of this era, vodafone, AT&T are to name a few, Google is having search pages in more than 35 languages and also they have the facility of the translation for users who are unable to understand English, and the best innovation so far that the company is managed to have is that if a user would login from any other country than he would find the specific google of that particular country and he can easily find the pages of same country on for a click, Google is indeed the world’s biggest search engine and it gets the result of searches in the form of HyperText Markup Language (html), Adobe portable document format (pdf), Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt), Microsoft Excel (xls), Microsoft Word (doc), Shockwave Flash (swf) and many others such as Lotus, the Google being the biggest search engine doesn’t think that it is the end of their innovation and it is the milestone they have achieved but they think that it is the start of achieving the milestone which would go on and on till the world is alive and showing trust on Google. Competition “Using search engines is now the second most popular activity on the Internet, after e-mail, and it is estimated that 550 million searches are performed daily on the web. With so many people using search engines they have become an advertisers' paradise. And where there are advertisers there are revenues to be had” (Google's competition preparing for battle, 2004). There has been a long discussion on the above statement, the competition is increasing amongst the search engines, at the top of the ratings are Yahoo and Google, Google is providing numerous services that have already been mentioned, however Yahoo is also a top rating search engine with the numerous services, in fact at couple of occasions the services given by the Google were acquired first by Yahoo, but the real innovation, look and ease was given to them by Google, which brings them at the top, however there are few other competitors as well such as ask jeeves and AltaVista. “Yahoo’s move into technology shows just how fierce the competition is getting and how Google's dominant position is coming under increasing threat. Not to be outdone, Ask Jeeves also has its own search engine technology called Teoma. If you own your own technology, it is argued, the easier it will be to differentiate yourself in what would otherwise be a commodity market” (Google's competition preparing for battle, 2004). Google only considers Yahoo as their strong competitors and that not even in every field, the ways of making profit used by these competitors are quite different, but the slow step into each others technology has costly to both of them and it would be very near that both of these would start fighting and doing direct attacks through marketing over each other, however there is no much threat Google is facing from any other competitors except Yahoo. Revenues The basic revenue generated by the Google is through two services and those are advertising and online search services, however there is also subdivision between them, in advertising there are Google Adword for advertisers and Google Adsense for Website services, while in online search services there are Google search services and Google search appliance, we would discuss them one by one. Google Adwords for advertisers The main source for revenue for Google is advertising, there advertising is creditable every now and than. The pricing they are using is Auction based pricing based on the value that an advertiser assigns to the particular keywords, when the user clicks the advertisement the click is counted and so the position of the ad is determined and according to the CPC (cost per click) the revenue increases as it is determined through the number of clicks that the user has done. The advertisers are required to create an account, which costs around $5, “Advertisers sign up online and manage their own accounts, which are activated with a credit card. For our larger advertisers, our full service account team sets up accounts, designs campaigns based on the advertiser's defined metrics and then monitors creative and click-through rates to continuously optimize those campaigns” (Google Adwords for advertisers, Quick Profile). The advertisers for Google include the big names such as General Motors, Disney, Sony, Canon, Sears, Amazon.com, Volvo and Xerox and couple of more. Google Adsense The Adsense actually displays different ads on search results and content pages. The technology that is used brings the kind of ads that the user is searching for in terms of general search, it analyzes what the user is willing to search and than brings the similar ads in front of the user to capture his/her eye. “Publishers can manage their own accounts, which are activated through an online application process and implemented by simply cutting and pasting some HTML onto their web pages. A dedicated sales team customizes programs for sites receiving more than 20 million page views per month” (Google Adsense and Website services, Quick Profile). The customer list includes names such as usatoday.com, abc.com, and forbes.com else thousands of other websites. Google Search Services This is a common business tool used by Google where it gives its name to other websites so that the users visiting them also get benefit of using Google as their search engine, however the search gets quite limited and narrow in terms of languages. The customers include in this category are AOL/Netscape, washingtonpost.com, netease (China), yam.com (Taiwan), Internet Services Group (U.K.) and few more. Google Search Appliance It is actually a very secure device that allows google to have a quality search across an individual website or intranet. “Hosted at the customer's location on the Google Search Appliance, with results customized to customer's specifications. Three models offer search across any size collection up to 15 million documents” (The Google Search Appliance, Quick Profile). The customer list includes The World Bank, P & G, PBS, Boeing, Cisco systems, Stanford University and couple of more. Google Wireless Services This is a unique service it delivers the Google search results on PDAs, cellular phones and other wireless devices. “Google's proprietary on-the-fly conversion system translates web pages into a language understood by handheld devices, so users can access the world's largest index of web pages. Google Wireless Search supports WML, HDML, HTML, and i-mode and J-Sky compatible HTML mobile Internet standards” (Google Wireless Services, Quick Profile). The customer list includes Qwest, Nextel, Sprint, Bell Mobility (Canada) etc. Work Cited . Google’s competition preparing for battle, . Read More