Google Inc.

Google Inc., American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. About 70 percent of all online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. The company’s headquarters are located in Mountainview, Calif.

Searching for business

Brin and Page, who met as graduate students at Stanford University, were intrigued with the idea of extracting meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room at Stanford to devise a new type of search technology, which they dubbed BackRub. The key was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each Web site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Most search engines simply returned a list of Web sites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Brin and Page incorporated into the search function the number of links each Web site had—i.e., a Web site with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than one with just a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities. Further, a link from a heavily linked Web site would be a more valuable “vote” than one from a more obscure Web site. Meanwhile, the partners established an idealistic 10-point corporate philosophy that included “Focus on the user and all else will follow,” “Fast is better than slow,” and “You can make money without doing evil.”

In mid-1998 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing (one of their first investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc.). They ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, Calif., under the name Google, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeroes). By mid-1999, when Google received a $25 million round of venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 queries per day. Activity exploded when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!, and by 2004 users were “googling” 200 million times a day. By 2008 Google was handling some 65 million searches per hour, and the company had become so ubiquitous that it entered the lexicon as a verb, to google being a common expression meaning to search the Internet.

The company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2004 raised $1.66 billion for the company and made Brin and Page instant billionaires, at least on paper, for the shares that they retained in the company. The stock offering also made news because of the unusual way it was handled. Shares were sold in a public auction intended to put the average investor on an equal footing with the professionals of the financial industry. Google was added to Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) stock index in 2006. By 2010 Google’s market capitalization made it one of the largest American companies not in the Dow Jones Industrial Average; among technology companies, it ranked alongside giants such as Microsoft Corporation and IBM in market value.

In November 2008 Google introduced three new enhancements to its search service: SearchWiki, Wikitude, and voice recognition. SearchWiki allows users to reshuffle or eliminate search results according to their individual preferences for different Web sources. Registered users of SearchWiki also have the option of adding annotations and ratings to Web sites retrieved in their searches; these user-generated comments are viewable by other registered users. Wikitude, a search service aimed at mobile telephone users, combines Google maps with the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to give individuals detailed information about local destinations. In addition, Google released voice-recognition software for Apple Inc.’s iPhone that enables spoken searches; searches may include information related to the iPhone’s current location, such as local restaurants.

In September 2010 Google Instant was introduced to its search engine. In this enhancement, search results appear as the user is typing a query, meaning that a user could receive a desired result even after typing only a few letters. Google claimed that Google Instant would save two to five seconds per search.

Advertising growth

Google’s strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google’s popularity in particular. Analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. Google derives most of its earnings from advertisements that it displays on Web pages returned by its search engine; the advertisements are tailored to correspond to users’ search terms.

Google has spent large sums to secure what appeared to be significant Internet marketing advantages. In 2003 Google spent $102 million to acquire Applied Semantics, the makers of AdSense, a service that signs up owners of Web sites to run various types of ads on their Web pages. In 2006 Google paid $102 million for another Web advertisement business, dMarc Broadcasting. That same year in August Google announced that it would pay $900 million over three and a half years for the right to sell ads on MySpace.com. In 2007Google made its largest acquisition to date, buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Two years later the company responded to the explosive growth in the mobile applications market with a $750 million deal to acquire the mobile advertising network AdMob. It was all part of Google’s effort to expand from its search engine business into advertising by combining the various firms’databases of information in order to tailor ads to consumers’ individual preferences.

Data centres

Exact details on Google’s operation are not published, though it is known that the company has at least three dozen data centres around the world, each of them containing several hundred thousand servers (basically, multiprocessor personal computers and hard drives mounted in specially constructed racks). Google’s interlinked computers, which probably number several million, are often called theGoogleplex. The heart of Google’s operation, however, is built around three proprietary pieces of computer code: Google File System (GFS), Bigtable, and MapReduce. GFS handles the storage of data in “chunks” across several machines; Bigtable is the company’s database program; and MapReduce is used by Google to generate higher-level data (e.g., putting together an index of Web pages that contain the words “Chicago,” “theatre,” and “participatory”).

In 2007 Google completed the construction of what is possibly its largest data centre, along the Columbia River near The Dalles, Ore. The site takes advantage of the cheap hydroelectric power offered by dams along the river. (The river was also chosen as the site for similar data centres for Microsoft and Yahoo!.)

Other services

Google.org

In 2004, in concert with the company’s IPO, Google set up an unusual for-profit philanthropy arm called Google.org and funded it with three million shares from its initial stock offering. As a for-profit entity, Google.org would be able to provide money for start-up firms or form partnerships with an eye toward advancing a social agenda, particularly focusing on climate change, public health, and poverty. Its early projects included development funding of an electric vehicle and improvements in solar energy technologies.

Gmail

In 2004 Google began offering a free Web-based e-mail account to select “beta” testers. The service, known as Gmail, was opened to the general public in 2007 and offered an unprecedented one gigabyte (one billion bytes) of free e-mail storage space, though users were also presented with advertisements based on keywords Google found in their messages. Google has regularly expanded the amount of free storage space given to users, which was in excess of seven gigabytes by 2008, and allows users to rent additional space. In 2007 Google acquired Postini, an e-mail security firm, for $625 million in order to improve Gmail’s security, especially inGoogle’s efforts to sign up businesses.

One of the main appeals of Gmail is that it is Web-based, so users can access their e-mail from any computer, personal digital assistant (PDA), or “smartphone” connected to the Internet. Also, it gives users an e-mail address that is independent of any particularInternet service provider (ISP), which makes it easier to maintain a permanent address. Google added a live video capability to Gmail in November 2008. Essentially a videophone, but over the Internet instead of telephone lines, Google’s voice and video chat operates with any standard Web camera and microphone to display a video signal within each user’s browser.

In January 2010 Google announced that it had detected a series of sophisticated hacking attacks, originating in China, that were directed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China. In some cases the accounts had been reconfigured to forward all incoming and outgoing e-mail to unfamiliar addresses. Google’s immediate response was to change Gmail’s protocol from the Web standard HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS, which increased security at the expense of speed. The attacks also ledGoogle to threaten to reverse its stance on censoring its Google.cn site and allow Chinese users to receive unfiltered search results. This brought the company into conflict with the Chinese government and raised the possibility of Google exiting the Chinese market altogether. In March, Google avoided direct conflict by automatically redirecting Chinese users of Google.cn to its unfiltered Hong Kongsite, Google.com.hk. This arrangement continued until Google’s government-issued license to operate in China came up for annual renewal at the end of June. At that time, Google changed Google.cn so that users could either use the censored Chinese site for services such as music search or manually click on a link to Google.com.hk for Web search. This move conciliated the Chinese government, which renewed Google’s license in July 2010.

Google Book Search

Google began yet another project in 2004, announcing that it was working with several major libraries around the world to begin making their holdings freely available on the Internet. Using sophisticated equipment, the company began by scanning public-domain books from the libraries’ collections. The books were converted into portable document files (PDFs) that are fully searchable, downloadable, and printable. Works still in copyright appeared only in fragmented “snippet” form. Google Book Search digitized about one million books per year in its initial years of operation.

In 2008 Google reached a legal settlement with two groups of authors and publishers that had sought to stop the company from making passages from their books available over the Internet. Google agreed to pay the groups $125 million for past transgressions, but, the agreement allowed, users could read for free up to 20 percent of each work scanned by Google, and, in exchange for allowing copyrighted works to be read (in part) online, the authors and publishers would receive 63 percent of all advertising revenue generated by page views of their material on Google’s Web site.

Google Video and YouTube

Google’s expansion was fueled largely by keyword-based Web advertising, which provided it with a sound footing to compete for dominance in new Web services such as the delivery of video content. In January 2005 Google launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close-captioned text from television broadcasts. A few months later Google began accepting user-submitted videos, with the submitter setting the prices for others to download and view the videos. In January 2006 Google Video Store opened, with premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS Corporation (television shows) and Sony Corporation (movies). In June 2006 Google began offering premium content for free but with ads.

For all of its marketing advantages, however, Google was unable to overtake the leader in online videos, YouTube. Following its introduction in 2005, YouTube quickly become the favourite site for users to upload small video files, which often attracted millions of viewers. Unable to generate anywhere near the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. Rather than merging the Web sites, however, Google continued YouTube’s operation as before.

There were questions about how Google would cope with the potential for copyright-infringement lawsuits over the copyrighted content that some consumers included in their homemade videos without permission and uploaded to YouTube. To reduce that risk, YouTube negotiated deals with a number of entertainment companies that would allow copyrighted video material to appear on its Web site and give YouTube users the right to include certain copyrighted songs in their videos. It also agreed to remove tens of thousands of copyrighted video files from its Web site. In November 2008 YouTube reached an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM), to show some of the studio’s full-length movies and television shows, the broadcasts being free to watch, with advertisements running alongside the programs.

Google Earth

Another Google technology effort captured public attention in 2005: the Google Earth service allows users to call up on their computer screens detailed satellite images of most locations on Earth. Furthermore, these maps can be used to create combinations (known as “mashups”) with various overlays, incorporating details such as street names, weather patterns, crime statistics, coffee shop locations, real estate prices, population densities, and so forth. While many of these mashups were created for convenience or simple novelty, others became critical lifesaving tools. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Google Earth provided interactive satellite overlays of the affected region, enabling rescuers to better understand the extent of the damage. Subsequently Google Earth became a vital tool in post-disaster recovery efforts.

Google’s commitment to privacy was questioned, however, after it introduced a related mapping service, called Street View, that showed street-level photographs from around the United States that were searchable by street address. Some photographs provided a view through house windows or showed persons sunbathing. Google defended the service by saying that the images showed only what a person could see if walking down the street.

In October 2008 Google Earth for the iPhone and the iPod Touch was released as a downloadable application from Apple Inc.’s Internet iTunes Store. With support for the accelerometer (motion detector) in Apple’s portable devices, this version of Google Earth adjusts the way that the three-dimensional maps are displayed as the devices are tilted.

In February 2009 Google Earth began adding marine data where information was available. In addition, the mapping service began offering a feature called Historical Imagery that allowed users to view a sequence of regional satellite images to see environmental changes, such as those caused by erosion or human agency.

Google Apps

In 2006, in what many in the industry considered the opening salvo in a war with Microsoft, Google introduced Google Apps—software hosted by Google that runs through users’ Web browsers. The first free programs included Google Calendar (a scheduling program),Google Talk (an instant messaging program), and Google Page Creator (a Web page creation program); in order to use these free programs, users had to put up with ads and be reconciled to having their data stored on Google’s equipment. This type of deployment, in which both the data and the programs are located somewhere “out there” on the Internet, is often called “cloud computing.”

Between 2006 and 2007 Google bought or developed various traditional business programs (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software) that were eventually collectively named Google Docs. Like Google Apps, Google Docs is used through a browser that connects to the data on Google’s machines. In 2007 Google introduced a Premier Edition of its Google Apps that included 25 gigabytes of e-mail storage, security functions from the recently acquired Postini software, and no ads; as the components of GoogleDocs became available, they were added to both the free ad-supported Google Apps and the Premier Edition. In particular, Google Docs was marketed as a direct competitor to Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

With the release in 2008 of Google Chrome, a Web browser with a superior JavaScript engine better suited for running programs within the browser, Google continued to advance its ability to serve customers over the Internet.

Android and Nexus One

On Nov. 5, 2007, Google announced the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of dozens of technology and mobile telephone companies, including Intel Corporation, Motorola, Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, Texas Instruments Incorporated, LG Electronics, Inc., Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel Corporation, and T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom). The consortium was created in order to develop and promote Android, a free open-source operating system based on Linux. The first phone to feature the new operating system was the T-Mobile G1, released on Oct. 22, 2008. Android-based phones require the latest third-generation (3G) wireless networks in order to take full advantage of all the system’s “smartphone” features, such as one-touch Google searches, GoogleDocs, Google Earth, and Google Street View.

In January 2010 Google broke into the mobile handset market with the Nexus One. Nicknamed the “Google Phone” and widely perceived to be a direct competitor to the iPhone, the Nexus One debuted to mostly positive reviews. Using the latest version of the Android operating system and boasting a vibrant 480 × 800-pixel screen, it was aesthetically pleasing, and its voice-to-text messaging system signaled a leap in voice-recognition software. However, its lack of native support for multi-touch—a typing and navigation feature pioneered by Apple that allowed users more flexibility in interacting with touchscreens—was seen as a drawback when compared with other handsets in its class.

Google Knol

On Dec. 13, 2007, Google announced that it was getting into the online encyclopaedia business with Knol. In the company’s self-proclaimed definition, a knol is a unit of knowledge. The Knol Web site was opened to the general public on July 23, 2008. Like Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopaedia, Knol is open to the general public; but unlike Wikipedia, participation in Knol requires a confirmation of identity before any articles or edits are allowed at the Knol Web site. Google bans pornographic, violent, and discriminatory articles.

In exchange for giving up their anonymity, authors have an opportunity to allow ads from Google’s AdSense on their Knol Web pages. By sharing with its authors any ad revenue generated by “page views” of their articles, Google hopes to induce submissions by professionals and highly qualified individuals. Authors may choose to allow edits by specific collaborators or open up their articles for editing by the entire Knol community. In addition, Knol operates as a free market, with no limit to the number of articles on the same subject. Google expects that well-written and maintained articles will rise to the top through user ratings. While Google does not edit or officially endorse any Knol article, its administration does choose a few articles to highlight on the Knol home page each day.

Google Voice

In 2007 Google acquired GrandCentral, a start-up subscription service that offered the promise of “one telephone number to rule them all”—a single number that users could give out to family, friends, and business contacts, together with a system for creating rules to determine which of their telephones (work, home, mobile) would be rung according to the incoming caller’s identity (as determined by telephone caller ID or the recipient’s address book). In addition, subscribers could call the system to retrieve voice mail. On March 12, 2009, Google relaunched GrandCentral as Google Voice, a free telecommunications service (initially open only to existing GrandCentral subscribers) that added a text messaging system and the ability to make VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) calls for free between any Internet service providers (ISP) located within the United States. Google Voice could also be used for making international calls, though that service was not free.

In addition to challenging traditional business models for long-distance telephone service, Google Voice competed with Skype, another free VoIP service. However, Skype customers needed a computer or a special telephone connected to a computer in order to make any calls, and only domestic calls to other Skype customers were free.