Publishing on the WWW S12: Google

Mia Skinner

What is Google?

Wikipedia describes Google as "an American multinational corporation which provides Internet-related products and services, including Internet search, cloud computing, software and advertising technologies. Advertising revenues from AdWords generate almost all of the company's profits."

History: An Overview

Google began sixteen years ago with two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Surgey Brin. They began working on a search engine called BackRub. At first it was hosted at Stanford, but quickly used up too much bandwidth for the university to support. In 1997, the two decide that BackRub needs a new name and decide on Google, a play off of the numerical term "googol" for the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros. They hoped to one day create a search engine that would seamlessly organize an infinite amount on the web. August 19, 2004, they had their initial market offering (IPO) and hired Eric Schmidt for an agreed term of 20 years (until 2024). After the IPO, the founders Surgey Brin and Larry Page reduced their salary to $1.They deemed the phrase, "don't be evil" as their unofficial slogan. Their current headquarters is in Mountain View, California, where they currently offer free wi-fi access to the town.

Google's Stock History

Products & Services

Google's rapid growth since its incorporation triggered many products, acquisitions and partnerships far beyond the company's core web search engine. Google has acquired many companies, focusing on small venture capital companies, including the following:

Keyhole, Inc. - start-up company developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a three-dimentional view of the Earth (Was renamed to Google Earth in 2005)
YouTube
DoubleClick (Gaining relationships with advertising companies)
GrandCentral (Later renamed Google Voice)
Aardvark - a social network engine

Google has endless products across the web and mobile devices that enhance our day to day lives. All of which come to consumers as FREE. However, there is a price to pay for all of the free services that Google provides- ninety-nine percent of their revenue is derived from its advertising programs. The last one percent of their revenue is generated through licencing and other means. Google acts as a broker across the web, providing us with useful tools, that otherwise would have been monopolized upon by other companies, such as Google Sites (free website building and hosting), Google Drive (free cloud file hosting), and Google Docs (free cloud word processing suite). A complete list of Google's products and services can be found at http://www.google.com/about/products/. On Demo Slam, videos demonstrate uses for Google's products.

Google's main advertising system is a two part program, AdWords and AdSense. Google AdWords allows advertisers to show their ads in the Gole content network through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view schematic. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display advertisements on their website, and earn a portion of the income every time an ad on their site is clicked.

Besides Google's web search services, they offer a variety of free online productivity tools. Gmail is their free email client that was the first service to provide a gigabyte of free email storage. Gmail is well known for its use of AJAX, a programming technique that lets web pages be interactive without refreshing the page. Google Docs is another useful tool that allows its users to create, edit and store documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides online. Google Calendar was another productivity tool created to keep calendars online, as well as synced with personal phones and devices. They have also created a web browser, Google Chrome.

How Google Influences the Web

Today, Google.com is one of the most visited websites across the web, available and well known all over the world. With its multitude of services and Android mobile services, Google is one of the leaders of the World Wide Web. Google helps individual users search the vast web, day to day, while also providing those users with useful tools on the web, for all to use, free of charge. In that sense, Google is a unique company where it puts the cost of operations on other companies and not the individual users. I believe Google will remain a staple of the web, and continue to innovate and provide free services to help promote the "open web". Google constantly is challenging the web, and helping other companies to also innovate and come up with creative ways to provide services to their customers.