The Story of Google - Research Paper Example

Google Inc. Google was started came into existence in January 1996 through Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s research project while they were PhD students at the University of Stanford, California. Their research project grew into one of the World Wide Web’s most influential companies and was named Google. The students’ goal, at first, was to come up with an efficient search engine that could give the user access to relevant links when they made search requests (Hamen 22). While its core purpose still remains, the company now provides mobile phone OS, productivity software, document storage, as well as e-mail services. In little over a decade and a half, the company has transformed from a two-man enterprise to a corporation worth US$ 58.145 billion. Its popularity continues to grow to date as it surpassed Microsoft in 2007 as the most liked Website. Its influence on the World Wide Web is undeniable with practically every webmaster willing for their company to be listed on their SERPs since this translates to into increased traffic for their websites (Hamen 24). Google has acquired other companies on the internet such as YouTube to numerous blogging sites. For some time, Google’s search technology also powered Yahoo! Search, which was a rival, for close to four years before they designed their own search engine. This is a research paper on Google Inc. Their influence does not stay limited to the web, with company executives announcing in 2007 that they intended to enter an auction by the FCC for the wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band that was earlier owned by analog TV broadcasters (Gilbert 65). This was aimed at fostering competition in the wireless service industry. They supported an approach of open technology to wireless service whereby clients could utilize any provider with their devices, rather than being limited by their provider’s choices and preferred vendors. While they did not win the bid, the company that did, Verizon, must now allow open technology, just as Google envisioned. ­ Google, as a search engine is a powerful tool that ensures the retrieval of information searched during a browsing session. Like all other search engines, it uses a special algorithm in order to generate results for a search. While they do share the general facts surrounding their algorithms, the company keeps the specifics a closely guarded secret. This is a help to their competitive strategy and reduces the probability that someone could abuse their system for personal gain. Google utilizes automated programs that are referred to as crawlers or spiders, as well as a large key word index and the location of those keywords (Gilbert 70). Google stands apart in its ranking of results that determine the order in which the findings from a search are put on view. PageRank, their trademarked algorithm, assign every webpage a score of relevancy. The rank is dependent on how long the web page has been in existence, the location and frequency of key words in the webpage, and the number of WebPages that also link to the page. As more WebPages link to a particular website, its page rank increases and shows up as the first result on the results page. Since Google uses the links to a page as a vote, cheating the system becomes difficult. Thus, the easiest way to achieve a high rank on Google is to provide great content to make people link to your page. When a page achieves many links, then the score on the PageRank will be higher. In 2008, Google initiated an experiment with its engine. It allowed a group of beta testers to alter their ranking order for search results. The beta testers could thus demote or promote search results while tailoring their experience to make it extra relevant on a personal level (Weber 55). However, there is still no sign that this particular component will be implemented on their engine on a global level. As Google has continued to grow, the organization has added new services for the engine users. Some of these services are designed to enable the Web searches become more relevant and efficient while some have little relevance to the core search engines (Weber 56). Most of these services have brought the company into competition with other organizations. Their specialized search is an extension of its search engine protocol. Using specialized searches, a user, can now narrow down their search to particular resources. Now, a user can use keywords in the search for book content, blog entries, online purchases, maps, images, scholarly papers and videos. Google has created a specialized index for these searches that contain only relevant sources. For example, a search for planet earth in the news category will only provider news articles that have these keywords, which results in a different look from their normal SERP (Weber 56). In the past few years, the company has unveiled services that are not related to its search engine, at least upon first glance. Google’s Gmail, a free e-mail program, was launched for a pre-determined number of users who had the ability to create accounts (Weber 59). The first batch of users then invited a limited group of people to be part of the service, making the invites a commodity. At present, anyone with internet access could sign up and get a free account. Gmail organizes its emails into conversations, which means that when an email is sent and replied to, the two emails are grouped together in the inbox as a thread (Weber 60). This eases the follow up of email exchange flow. Responding to an email sees Google attach the message to the thread-bottom. This makes navigation of the email program easier, as well as improving the ability to follow a specific conversation. Google Docs is also a crucial service offered, by Google, which is a storage database, as well as a collaborative productivity software suite (Duthel 22). It is inclusive of presentation programs, spreadsheets and word processing. Creating an account is free, allowing the user to store as many as 5000 images and documents online. Each of the documents can be 500 kilobytes while embedded images have a limit of 2 megabytes. Google Docs allows the users friends to view the documents and make changes to them. The user can store all their documents on the company’s servers and access them whenever an internet connection is available (Duthel 23). Back in 1998, the equipment used by Google was relatively modest, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, using equipment donated by Stanford and other partners. At present, Google uses more than one hundred thousand servers to service its customers. Their strategy involves the use of relatively inexpensive machines that run on Linux based Operating systems (Duthel 30). Google File System is a program used, by Google, to manage all the data on their numerous servers. Google utilizes these servers for different tasks. Web servers will receive and process questions from the users and send requests to the next server that is appropriate for the search. Google index servers store the search results and indexes. Document servers are used for the storage of search summaries. Google Docs files, Gmail, and user information, while Ad servers are used for the storage of advertisements that are displayed on Google’s search pages (Duthel 31). Google has evolved greatly since its founding; now employing over nineteen thousand employees around the globe. In September of 2008, its market capitalization was more than $145 billion. Its listed stock in NASDAQ had more than 314 million shares in the market place (Smith & Ryan 44). Its campus in Mountain view, California is nicknamed Googleplex. This campus has game rooms, exercise rooms, and snack rooms, as well as several café stations. Google also provides a comprehensive package of rewards and benefits for Google employees that offer a host of services including dental and medical coverage. Other services that are part of the Google employee benefits package are childcare centers, special corporate events, financial planning classes, on-site doctors, adoption assistance services and tuition reimbursement. Their philosophy also emphases on non-profit work, which sees Google, match up to $3,000 of all contributions made by employees to any non-profit organization of repute (Smith & Ryan 45). Google has proven itself as being one of the internet’s most dominant forces, with a mission to organize the global information and make its accessibility and usefulness near universal. With a goal that aims this high, it is a good bet that the manpower behind Google feel that their work and purpose is only just beginning. Works cited Duthel, Heinz. Google Inc. Services - Google Tools - What Is Google? Raleigh: Lulu.com, 2011. Print. Gilbert, Sara. The story of Google. Mankato : Creative Education , 2011. Print. Hamen, Susan. Google : the company and its founders. Edina: ABDO Pub. Co., 2011. Print. Smith, Bud E. and Ryan Williams. Google Business Solutions All-in-one for Dummies Epub Edition. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc , 2012. Print. Weber, Stephan. Organizational behaviour - Google corporate culture in perspective. Munich : GRIN Verlag GmbH , 2012. Print. Read More