The History of Google - Essay Example

History of Google Google is one of the most notorious search engines across the world. Actually beginning as a research project in January 1996, Google has now attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, especially due to their simple, uncluttered, and clear design – which gives it a significant competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on other websites which for the most part were filled with irrelevant visual distractions. In order to understand the company itself, its history, the main priorities and innovative strategies, the following questions must be addressed: 1. What is the history of the company? 2. What are its main markets, products and competitors? 3. What are its main technologies or capabilities? 4. What is its innovative strategy? 5. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for its innovative strategies? By thoroughly discussing these five questions, we can come to a clearer, more understanding and more knowledgeable objective on this subject matter. This is what will be dissertated in the following. What is the History of the Company? The domain name of google.com was legally registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was completely incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998. Located in Mountain View, California, the company employs approximately 5,700 employees and these headquarters are referred to as the ‘Googleplex’. By the time the year 2000 ended, Google was already handling more than 100 million search queries a day, while always continuously looking for new ways to connect people with the information they needed, whenever and wherever they needed it. The company founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were apparently actually not very fond of each other when they first met at Stanford University. Both Page and Brin had strong opinions and divergent viewpoints and basically argued about every single topic they discussed. However it was this anomaly which “…would eventually find common ground in a unique approach to solving one of computing’s biggest challenges: retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data.” (“Google”, 2006). It was in January of 1996 when the collaboration had begun on Google, which at that point in time was titled ‘BackRub’. The reasoning Larry and Sergey gave for the naming of Google at this point in time was for its “unique ability to analyze the ‘back links’ pointing to a given website.” (“Google”, 2006). In 1998, Larry and Sergey began the search for a buyer, all the while continuing to work to perfect their technology through the first half of 1998. They in fact bought a terabyte of disks at bargain prices and built their own computer housings setup in Larry’s dorm room, which actually became Google’s first data center. Although the two were determined to find a potential business partner, at that point in time no one was interested at all in the idea. One among the many they called was their friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo, who said that “When it’s fully developed and scalable, let’s talk again.” (“Google”, 2006). He was impressed and thought that their technology was solid, but encouraged them to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. It was Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, took a long at Larry and Sergey’s demo and saw the long view potential. It was he who gave them their first check – for $100,000. However, since there was no legal entity known as ‘Google, Inc.”, (which the check was written out to), Larry and Sergey were basically forced to set up an actual corporation, which they did. It was set up as an attachment to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three. The growth of Google was incredulous, and by February of 1999 had moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. There were now eight employees rather than three, and the company was now answering more than 500,000 queries a day. This was significantly impressive, especially considering the short period of time it had taken for them to get to this point. Google continued to expand and grow and develop, and clients began to sign on, such as the Italian portal Virgilio and Virgin Net, the UK’s leading online entertainment guide. Google’s features and performance seemed to unfalteringly attract new users at an astounding rate. In May 2000 the site was awarded both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award for technical achievement. “The following month, Google officially became the world’s largest search engine with its introduction of a billion-page index – the first time so much of the web’s content had been made available in a searchable format.” (“Google”, 2006). On June 26, 2000, Google and Yahoo! announced a partnership which resulted in solidifying the company’s reputation. It was significantly soon after this that partnership deals were announced on all fronts, with China’s leading portal NetEase and NEC’s BIGLOBE portal in Japan both adding Google search to their sites. As the year 2000 ended, Google soon realized that people are not always conveniently at their desks or at home when questions pop into their minds, which is what first sent them into the expansion of their availability. “The first half of 2001 saw a series of partnerships and innovations that would bring Google search to a worldwide audience of mobile users.” (“Google”, 2006). What are its Main Markets, Products, and Competitors? Google attains a vast array of markets and products, and of course has its share of competitors. Although Google has been statistically shown as being by far the most popular, especially as of lately, there have been many companies trying their best to reach the height of popularity of which Google stands at. The two most upstart competitors of Google are ‘Wisenut’ and ‘Teoma’. As Google does, these two search engines share the primary focus on not letting companies pay for placement. Many people do not realize that the items at the top of the results on some other search engines are there simply because they paid for that position. Google, on the other hand, as well as these two separate search engines, instead hold fast to the notion that what appears up top are the resources that are the best, rather than the companies who endorsed their position. Wisenut and Teoma both have noticeable similarities to Google, no doubt in regards to the popularity of many of the focuses of the company Google – the clean, uncluttered design and layout, and the quick speed, for example. Companies are well aware of the factors that create popularity, and will then try to mimic those factors themselves, in order to gain that popularity for themselves. There are hundreds of online search engines available today, and yet only several come even close to the notoriety of one such as Google. What are its Main Technologies or Capabilities? Google runs on a significantly unique combination of advanced hardware and software, and their superfast speed “…can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together to create a superfast search engine.” (Google, 2006). Google also uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are not only relevant, but especially important to your search. They also take more than that into consideration, in that they examine all aspects of the page’s content, to determine whether or not the particular page itself is a good match for your query, which as an end result partly explains the accuracy of Google’s delivering of the most relevant search results. What is its Innovative Strategy? When discussing Google’s innovative strategies, currently, Google enables searches to reach into a wide variety of enterprise content systems using common protocols such as SMB and database APIs. On the other hand, when speaking of its innovative strategies of the future, the company is planning on providing richer connectivity to ERP systems and back-end data, a Google executive said. Some of Google’s past innovative strategies, some examples are: the Google Programming Contest, which coupled a challenge with a rewarding prize of $10,000; Google’s web application programming interfaces, which enabled software programs to query Google directly; and Google Compute, which was newly added to the Google Toolbar, and which took advantage of idle cycles on user’s computers in order to help solve computation-intensive scientific problems. What are Some of the Challenges and Opportunities for its Innovative Strategies? One of the most primary challenges Google faces in regards to its innovative strategies would be that due to their popularity and the fact that so many companies are now trying to follow in their footsteps. In other words, Google now has to constantly continue to bring fresh ideas to the table, while all the time maintaining a similar focus to their beginning ideals, as that was what brought them all the positive feedback to begin with. In order to prepare for the future, Google is aware that they must constantly keep up with the ever-growing search engine competition, in order to stay ahead of the game in that matter. The freshness and cleanness of their site is ingenious, as it will certainly never go out of style. Users enjoy the easiness, speed, and accuracy of Google as a search engine, and by the looks of things, it doesn’t seem as though Google’s popularity is going anywhere but up. Bibliography “Google”. Google. http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html. “Wikipedia”. Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google. Read More