General info

Google Inc. is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet searching and online advertising. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has 12,238 full-time employees (as of March 31, 2007). Google's mission statement is, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google's corporate philosophy includes statements such as "Don't be evil", and "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun".

The origin

Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed, "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 1999. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googleplex.

The name

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google", was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." Nowadays within internet communities, the name Google is perceived as the most significant search engine in the world and from the commercial point of view firms like Search Engine Optimization SEO Company put great attention to what results it generates and how efficient it is in internet matketing.

Growth

While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has begun to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media-the Internet and radio-with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Partnerships

In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government agencies to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames Research Center to build up 1 million square feet of offices and work on research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google also entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company entered into a partnership with Time Warner's America Online, to enhance each other's video search services.

Products

Most of Google's revenue is derived from its online advertising programs. Google AdWords allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google's search results and the Google Content Network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. Google AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked. Google is well-known for its web search service, which is a major factor of the company's success. As of December 2006, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 50.8% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23.6%) and Windows Live Search (8.4%). Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps and more. In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail.Gmail features spam filtering technology and the capability to use Google technology to search email. The service generates revenue by displaying advertisements from the AdWords service that are tailored to the content of the email messages displayed on screen. In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which not only allows users to search and view freely available videos, but also offers users and media publishers the ability to publish their content, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos. Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite imagery that covers the vast majority of the earth. Google Earth is generally considered to be remarkably accurate and extremely detailed. For example, some major cities (Las Vegas, NV, USA for example) have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to read the license plates on cars on a street.

PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools. The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

Web directories

A web directory is a human-compiled index of sites placed on the World Wide Web. In terms of the number of indexed pages it cannot be compared with the automatic web browser like Google, but information included in it is properly described and thematically categorized. Before a site is placed in the index, it is reviewed by an editor which means that getting listed in a directory may be often quite difficult and inclusions are usually paid for. Examples of the best known general directories include: Yahoo! Directory, The Open Directory, World Wide Web Virtual Library, Ansearch Directory, Best of the Web Directory. Directories are considered important since, for example, ODP data is provided to the core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines like Google, Alexa and Netscape Search. Apart from general directories there are also other good quality directories like: Paid Web Directory , DirFly Web Directory , Linksavenue.com Business directory ... Submitting to such a directory is a great way to get your link noticed.

Easter eggs and April Fool's Day jokes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon), and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced. In 2006, they came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service. In 2007, Google announced two joke products. The first was a free wireless Internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) in which one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting only an hour for a "Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)" to connect it to the Internet. Additionally, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, which allows users of their free email service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke, although both of these turned out to be genuine announcements. In 2005, a comedic graph depicting Google's goal of "infinity plus one" GB of storage was featured on the Gmail homepage.