The meaning of Google over the year's....

Here is something about the search engine giant which I would like to share with you guys...

For most people, this logo means Internet search. As Google enters more markets, it will need to mean a whole lot more.

As new competitors aim to reshape the Web and new products change its focus, what does it mean to be Google?

The question of meaning has been an easy one to answer for most of Google's history. Google meant search: Google's own dictionary application defines "Google" as a verb meaning "to search." (The folks at Merriam-Webster concurred.) And Google's brand reached those heights through a very conscious decision to forgo the traditional brand advertising that competitors like Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Microsoft, and others embraced.

Clearly, that worked. But Google is entering a new era in which it has branched out into all sorts of fields, from mobile phones to broadband networking to business services.

Google no longer means "search," at least not exclusively. To varying degrees, Google also means e-mail, browsers, broadband networking, alternative energy, personal computing, and, to some, scary Internet giant. Google has embraced limited amounts of advertising in some of those areas--such as the "Going Google" campaign for Google Docs--but continues to resist the temptation to tell its story more broadly.

The way it was...

Google briefly considered traditional marketing during its infancy in the late 1990s. After all, everybody else was doing it, and it seemed amid a dot-com frenzy that the only way to get noticed was to enter the fray.

But in an interview with the alumni magazine of her alma mater, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Google's first marketing executive, Cindy McCaffrey, explained that co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were skeptical of just about anything traditional when it came to business. After realizing what it would cost to do a traditional brand advertising campaign they decided instead to spend that money on engineering and infrastructure.

What's next?
Google is in a tricky place at the moment as it tries to preserve its company culture amid a shifting industry.

Facebook's size and ambition shows that word-of-mouth and PR are still a very effective way to build a dynamic Web business, but also that the conversation marketers want to see and influence is moving more and more into a space that does not contain Google.

And in the next big computing market, Google is between the proverbial rock and a hard place, torn between building its Android technology as a successful competitor to Apple's iPhone by supporting partners while changing the way mobile phones are sold with the Nexus One by promoting its own phone.

"They've got a brand problem/opportunity," Battelle said, explaining that he believes Google will eventually shift its brand from search to software. This is a problem many companies would love to have: after all, most people who have ever used the Internet have encountered Google, and its market-share numbers prove they're sticking around.

So, whats your opinion...