About Google?

Ever come across a website and not know what they do? What about who they are, where they started, and how they make money? This may be a bit late that should have this in an earlier post, but better than nothing. This article I took from his writing follows trafficestimate.com

Google is a multinational public cloud computing and Internet search technologies corporation. It hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. It was incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. Google.com began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its founders and owners, while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.

The company's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don't Be Evil". In 2006, the company moved its headquarters to Mountain View, California, where they are based at present. Google got its name from a misspelling by Page and Brin as they originally called their new search engine "backrub." The word "Google" comes from "googol" that is the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

Google started as a search engine company and till date, its search engine Google.com, that uses over one million servers in data centers around the world and processes over one billion search requests every day, remains the pivot of its diverse internet services. Google's search engine is unique in that it analyzes relationships between different websites. This differs from other search engines that rank the search results by counting the number of times the word appears on the page, which can cause many loopholes such as web pages plastering the word all over with no relation to anything merely to gain hits (spamming). Google uses the system of analyzing relationships between websites called Page Rank (PR), where the number of pages and the importance of those pages that link back to the original website, determines a website's relevance.

Google has enriched its internet search services extensively over the years by including a host of new features. In addition to "googling" your search, Google can also search for relevant images, news, and videos. If you enter a road address, you can go on Google Maps to route a path from your current position to your destination. Now, if someone goes to the Google.com homepage, they will find they have an array of services from which to choose. One powerful combination is Gmail (Google Mail) and Google Calendar - this is like your own personal agenda and mailbox as you can organize your dates, events, and email all in one place.

Google also offers social networking tools Orkut and Buzz, online productivity software, web browser Google Chrome, photo organization and editing software Picassa, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. It has also developed Android in collaboration with another company, which is the world's first fully open platform that any developer can use and any hardware manufacturer can install on a mobile device or smart phone.

So how exactly does Google profit from all this? The answer lies in advertisement. The Google Adwords program offers advertisers measurable, cost-effective, and highly relevant advertising, so that the ads are useful to the people who see them as well as to the advertisers who run them. It allows advertisers to display their advertisements in Google websites, through either a cost-per-click (CPC) or a cost-per-view (CPM) scheme. The Google AdSense program allows website owners such as bloggers and publishing companies to display these advertisements on their website, and earn money every time ads get clicked. Apparently, this is very profitable because Google generates revenue in the tens of billions by advertisements alone.

Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, including Keyhole Inc., YouTube, DoubleClick, GrandCentral, and Aardvark. Google's initial public offering was on August 19, 2004. The company is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. The term "Google" has now come into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, described as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." Its immense usefulness and popularity is evident by the fact that Alexa lists Google as the Internet's most visited website – this top position is only challenged by the rise of Facebook. According to Fortune Magazine, Google is the fourth best place to work, and BrandZ lists it as the most powerful brand in the world.

Some competitors of Google include Yahoo, Bing.com, AOL, and Ask Jeeves (ask.com). However, based on viewer count, profit, and features, it is safe to say that Google's supremacy over its competitors is irrefutable.