Google - "The numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros".

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offer a peek inside the Google machine, sharing tidbits about international search patterns, the philanthropic Google Foundation, and the company's dedication to innovation and employee happiness.

Google - "The numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros".

According to the present scenario of internet,technology and websites boom, I think google is a perfect search engine for every internet users all over the world. Google made an innovation in the field of search engines for the people to access to the information, whenever and wherever they need it.

Google is a public and profitable company focused on search services. Named for the mathematical term "googol," Google operates web sites at many international domains, with the most trafficked being www.google.com. Google is widely recognized as the "world's best search engine" because it is fast, accurate and easy to use. The company also serves corporate clients, including advertisers, content publishers and site managers with cost-effective advertising and a wide range of revenue generating search services. Google's breakthrough technology and continued innovation serve the company's mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful."

Google's Key Success Factors

Google is the first major company to fully understand and implement the recently born web culture.  The key success factors are:

Scalability   -what works on a small scale has to work on  a large scale.This implies to infrastructures - a system must be ready for heavy loads - as well as to business models. A product must be adapted for a very large number of customers.

Network Effects -the benefit of a product or a service increases with number of users. The reach of a critical mass of users constitutes to the significant barriers to the entry of the competitors.

Data  - whether it be for internal management or for the customer knowledge, the web offers the oppurtunity to collect, exploit and analyze a very large amount of data. this metric environment helps optimizing uncertainity management.

Openness - the traditional walled garden media strategy exploded; content and services must be open to all, and be interoperable.

Co-creation - non-traditional actors became part of the value chain.in particular, users content creators and external developers are given the tools to create new markets.

Business Model - advertising is not a market but a business model. Google is able to extend its domination by creating new markets or changing the model of existing industries.

Launch and Strategies of Google

In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 24, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 23, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during this first meeting.Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year - eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.

Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google -- a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn't exist yet: a company called Google Inc. Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki's garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park. Google files for incorporation in California on September 4, 1998. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company's name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim's cheque. Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he's a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford. Then, in December 1998, "PC Magazine" reports that Google "has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results" and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites.

Business Overview

As with its technology, Google has chosen to ignore conventional wisdom in designing its business. The company started with seed money from angel investors and brought together two competing venture capital firms to fund its first equity round. While the dotcom boom exploded around it and competitors spent millions on marketing campaigns to "build brand," Google focused instead on quietly building a better search engine.
The word quickly spread from one satisfied user to another. With superior search technology and a high volume of traffic at its Google.com site, Google's managers identified two initial opportunities for generating revenue: search services and advertising.

Technology Overview

Google's Search Services on the web

We stand alone in our focus on developing the "perfect search engine," defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

From the beginning, developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, ours employed linked PCs to quickly find each query's answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It's an idea that others have since copied, while we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

* PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.
* Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.

Our innovations don't stop at the desktop. To give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, we continue to develop new mobile applications and services that are more accessible and customizable. And we're partnering with industry-leading carriers and device manufacturers to deliver these innovative services globally. We're working with many of these industry leaders through the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, which will offer people a less expensive and better mobile experience.
Google grows and business blooms

Google's Advertising on the web

Over time, these two business lines evolved into complementary networks. Google AdWords advertisers create ads to drive qualified traffic to their sites and generate leads. Google publishing partners deliver those ads targeted to relevant search results powered by Google AdSense. With AdSense, the publisher shares in the revenue generated when readers click on the ads.

For sites wishing to have more control over their intranet or site searches, Google developed the Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure appliance that delivers accurate search results across any number of documents.

Google continues to think about ways in which technology can improve upon existing ways of doing business. New areas are explored, ideas prototyped and budding services nurtured to make them more useful to advertisers and publishers. However, no matter how distant Google's business model grows from its origins, the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.

Google AdWords for Advertisers

Google designed AdWords for advertisers who want to reach a qualified audience as efficiently as possible. Advertisers select their own target keywords and only pay when customers click on their ads. It's easy to create ad text and manage online advertising accounts with no large upfront payment required. All that's needed is five minutes and a credit card. The ads appear across Google's growing roster of partners, including thousands of sites from America Online to the Washington Post, and are targeted to relevant search and content pages.

Google's experienced sales and service team optimize campaigns for our larger advertisers. Our staff of AdWords experts work with advertisers to select the appropriate keywords and generate the matching creative, then carefully monitor the campaign to improve its performance over time by winnowing keywords and rewriting copy based on what is most effective. There's no limit to the number of keywords that an advertiser can select and each keyword can be matched with a different creative execution. Recent advertisers include Amazon, Cisco Systems and Staples.

Google provides all of its advertisers with a full complement of reporting services to enable fine tuning of campaigns and real-time intelligence about which components are performing best. Advertisers can further increase efficiencies by targeting their campaigns to specific geographies or languages.
Google AdSense and Web Site Services

Google believes relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content. And that advertising can enhance the experience for visitors to a publisher's website, while helping publishers recover some of their investment in creating content of value. Google AdSense™ combines Google Search technology with our base of keyword advertisers to deliver ads that precisely target search results or the content on a site's pages, no matter how specialized the subject matter. Advertisers, publishers, and information seekers all profit as a result.

Signing up for AdSense is easy -- it only takes a few minutes to apply. And our sales team helps customize the program for sites receiving more than 20 million page views a month.

* AdSense serves relevant ads on content pages search result and content pages as well as dormant domain pages.Google Search Services enable publishers to provide Google web search on their own pages – results that can be used to generate revenue with the AdSense for Search program The Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure device that provides Google quality search across an individual website or intranet.
* Google Wireless Services deliver Google search results via PDAs, wireless phones and other mobile devices powered by many of the world's leading wireless service providers.

 Google Culture

Google's emphasis on innovation and commitment to cost containment means each employee is a hands-on contributor. There's little in the way of corporate hierarchy and everyone wears several hats. The international webmaster who creates Google's holiday logos spent a week translating the entire site into Korean. The chief operations engineer is also a licensed neurosurgeon. Because everyone realizes they are an equally important part of Google's success, no one hesitates to skate over a corporate officer during roller hockey.

Google's hiring policy is aggressively non-discriminatory and favors ability over experience. The result is a staff that reflects the global audience the search engine serves. Google has offices around the globe and Google engineering centers are recruiting local talent in locations from Zurich to Bangalore. Dozens of languages are spoken by Google staffers, from Turkish to Telugu. When not at work, Googlers pursue interests from cross-country cycling to wine tasting, from flying to frisbee. As Google expands its development team, it continues to look for those who share an obsessive commitment to creating search perfection and having a great time doing it.