Understanding Google

Getting to know the phenomenom known as Google

Google, who went public after the dot com bubble, seems like they can do no wrong. Starting off as an idea between two Stanford students, it has branched out and grown into a colossal business that everyone in the IT world would love to work for.

How did Google get started?

The story of two college students.

Two students, that loved the internet but thought the current search standards were rather poor. Searching for one thing would bring you results that were just not accurate in any way shape or form. Going through pages and pages of search results to find 3 sites that related to what you were searching for. Brainstorming they came up with the basic concept of what we know today as ‘PageRank’.

PageRank is like a ‘voting system’, getting a link to your site, from another site, is considered a vote. The value of this vote varies between popularity of the site linking to yours, and content relevancy. If the site linking to you, has content that doesn’t match yours in any way, the link value is less than if a site that linked to you had simliar content to yours. Making any sense?

Starting on just 2 computers at Stanford, Google has a lot of multi-billion dollar data centers to store their index of the Web. It seems like they nailed this one right on the head.

Where did they get all that money?

The secret to online advertising.

Now that Google has this huge index of the web, with the best algorithm to sort it based on keywords, why not make a little revenue with this data. Google started this program called Adsense. With Adsense Google was able to allow advertisers to bid on keywords. Say you sell shoes, when someone searches Google for ’shoes’ you can have your site up there on top as a ’sponsored link’. Which drives tons of traffic to you.

You have to think, with over 1 billion people out there viewing the internet, there is money to be made in advertising. Adsense was the first program to come along that didn’t make you pick an annoying flashy banner or popup ad. With companies paying over 1 million dollars for 30 seconds on the Super Bowl, it’s no wonder why Google made over 1 billion in profits last quarter.

Google = Giant

Who would think Microsoft vs. Google

Now that Google dominated online search, then online advertising, what else is next? Microsoft, that’s what. With Wikipedia becoming so huge, and then web mail taking over mail clients, Google figured why not expand this ‘online application’ market into something Microsoft would grow to hate.

Google is buying web startups left and right. It was clear that they were about to create a competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite. First they released a Word Processor, then came Spreadsheets, and finally we see they will come out with a Power Point Presentation application.

Google is taking widely used applications out there(email, word, power point, excel, search, advertising), and using them in ways they should be used. It’s nice to see Google take something like email, and make a service better than anything else out there.

The future of Google

What do you expect to see out of Google in the next few years? Could free wireless internet be in the works? What about data centers 2 and 3 times as big as the current data centers we know today. Or even online storage to store data, music, videos, backups, and more. These are all things Google has been talking about, or even started working on already. We may even seen Google create the infamous AI somewhere down the line.

Want to give Google a try? Use the search box below to find out what all the fuss is about.

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June 8, 2007 | Filed Under

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