10/22/2009
FIN MAN
DRAGONS
INTRODUCTION TO GOOGLE
About the Corporation
| Blasco, Dhaliwal, Kim
Introduction to Google
Blasco, Dhaliwal, Kim
Contents
Attribution ................................................................................................................................ 3
Our Contribution ................................................................................................................... 3
Wikipedia .............................................................................................................................. 3
Creative Commons ................................................................................................................ 4
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 5
History ....................................................................................................................................... 6
Name ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Financing and initial public offering .......................................................................................... 8
Growth ...................................................................................................................................... 9
Acquisitions ........................................................................................................................... 9
Partnerships ........................................................................................................................ 10
Products and services ......................................................................................................... 11
Advertising .......................................................................................................................... 11
Software .................................................................................................................................. 13
Gmail ................................................................................................................................... 14
Enterprise Products ................................................................................................................ 16
Platform .................................................................................................................................. 17
Corporate affairs and culture.................................................................................................. 18
Googleplex .............................................................................................................................. 20
Innovation Time Off ............................................................................................................ 21
Easter eggs and April Fool's Day jokes ................................................................................ 21
IPO and culture ................................................................................................................... 22
Philanthropy........................................................................................................................ 22
Network Neutrality ................................................................................................................. 24
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Attribution
All the content in this report, except for the Top Web Links section is from Wikipedia, licensed
under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License (see below for an overview of both
Wikipedia and the Creative Commons). The following picture shows the full license below (it is also
set up as a hyperlink to the original web source for this license).
(Wikipedia, 2009)
Our Contribution
We have attempted to add extra value to the content by structuring it in an easy to read, business
report format and to add an informative “Top Web Links” section. We have also added an index to
help you find what you are looking for. We hope you find it useful and worth the $1 purchase price.
We have prepared this report as part of a MS Word 2007 assignment for BSYS 1000 – Computer
Applications I that we are taking at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). All proceeds
will go to student clubs within the School of Business at BCIT.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based mostly
on anonymous contributions. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a
type of collaborative Web site) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to
guide the user to related pages with additional information.
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Wikipedia is written collaboratively by an international (and mostly anonymous) group of
volunteers. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia
articles. There are no requirements to provide one’s real name when contributing; rather,
each writer’s privacy is protected unless they choose to reveal their identity themselves.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference
web sites, attracting around 65 million visitors monthly as of 2009. There are more than
75,000 active contributors working on more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260
languages. As of today, there are 3,062,069 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of
thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits
and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia
encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics.)
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of
creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization
has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These
licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they
waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
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Introduction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the corporation. For the search engine, see Google search. For the
number 10100, see Googol. For other uses, see Google (disambiguation).
Website Google.com
Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to
its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video
sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google
has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system. The Google
headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009
(2009 -03-31)[update], the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is
running thousands of servers worldwide, which process millions of search requests each day
and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour.[5]
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford
University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on
September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67
billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of $23 billion. Google has continued its
growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships.
Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important
tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as
Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work,[6] and as the most powerful brand in the
world.[7] Alexa ranks Google as the most visited website on the Internet.[8]
Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful".[9] The unofficial company slogan, coined by former employee and Gmail's first
engineer[10] Paul Buchheit, is "Don't be evil".[11][12][13] Criticism of Google includes
concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, and censorship.
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History
Main article: History of Google
Google in 1998
The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and
was designed to be very fault-tolerant. Google began in January 1996, as a research project
by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University in California.[14] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed
the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing
techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term
appeared on a page.[15] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because
the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[16][17] A small search
engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.[18]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages
must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their
thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the
search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu.
The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997,[19] and the company was
incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park,
California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost $1.1
million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun
Microsystems.[20]
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an
"advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the
topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed
simple text ads.[21]
In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other noted
Silicon Valley technology startups. [22] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the
company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California at 1600 Amphitheatre
Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.[23] The company has remained at this location
ever since, and the complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex (a play on the
word googolplex). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[24]
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The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet
users, who liked its simple design and useful results.[25] In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords.[14] The ads were text-based to maintain
an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.[14] Keywords were sold
based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per
click.[14] This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later
renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo!
Search Marketing).[26][27][28] Goto.com was an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and
was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture
Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture's pay-per-click and
bidding patents by Google's AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with
Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual
license.[29] Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace,
Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.[14]
A patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on 4
September 2001.[30] The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists
Lawrence Page as the inventor.
Name
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of the word "googol",[31][32] which refers
to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its
way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam
Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use
the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."[33][34]
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Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998, in the form of a
$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a
corporation which did not yet exist.[35]
On June 7, 1999 a round of funding of $25 million was announced,[36] with the major
investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia
Capital.[35]
The Google IPO took place on 19 August 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of
$85 per share.[37][38] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈
1.4142135) were floated by Google, and the remaining 5,462,917 were offered by existing
stockholders. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23
billion.[39] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of
Google. Many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of
Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of 9
August 2004, ten days before the IPO.[40]
The stock performance of Google after its first IPO launch has gone well, with shares hitting
$700 for the first time on 31 October 2007,[41] due to strong sales and earnings in the
advertising market, as well as the release of new features such as the desktop search
function and its iGoogle personalized home page.[42] The surge in stock price is fueled
primarily by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual
funds.[42]
The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and
under the London Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGEA.
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Growth
While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun
experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006,
Google announced the purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an
automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio.[43] This will allow
Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's
ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in
selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select
advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times.[44] They have been filling unsold space in the
newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
Acquisitions
See also: List of acquisitions by Google
Since 2001, Google has acquired several companies, mainly focusing on small start-ups.
In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc.,[45] which developed a product
called Earth Viewer, renamed in 2005 to Google Earth.
In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog statistics
application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled. The
last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on 6 April 2006 and outlined
many of the known issues of the service.[46]
In late 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.[47]
Shortly after, on 31 October 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a
developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites.[48]
On 13 April 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed to
buy the company for $3.1 billion.[49]
On 2 July 2007, Google purchased GrandCentral. Google agreed to buy the company for $50
million.[50]
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On 9 July 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire
enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.[51]
On August 5 2009, Google announced the purchase of video software maker On2
Technologies for $106.5 million - its first acquisition of a public company. [52]
Partnerships
In 2005, Google entered into partnerships with other companies and government agencies
to improve production and services. Google announced a partnership with NASA Ames
Research Center to build up 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices and work on
research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed
computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry.[53] Google also entered into a
partnership with Sun Microsystems in October to help share and distribute each other's
technologies.[54] The company entered into a partnership with AOL of Time Warner,[55] to
enhance each other's video search services.
The same year, the company became a major financial investor of the new .mobi top-level
domain for mobile devices, in conjunction with several other companies, including
Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson among others.[56] In September 2007, Google launched,
"Adsense for Mobile", a service for its publishing partners which provides the ability to
monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads,[57] and
acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi, to "provide people worldwide with
direct access to Google applications, and ultimately the information they want and need,
right from their mobile devices."[58]
In 2006, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corp. entered into a $900 million
agreement to provide search and advertising on the popular social networking site,
MySpace.[59]
Google has developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with
high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite
was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 6 September 2008.[60]
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In 2008, Google announced that it was hosting an archive of Life magazine's photographs, as
part of a joint effort. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the
magazine.[61] The photos are watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on
all photos, regardless of public domain status.[62][63]
Products and services
Google appliance as shown at RSA Conference 2008Main article: List of Google products
Google has created services and tools for the general public and business environment alike,
including Web applications, advertising networks and solutions for businesses.
Advertising
99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs.[64] For the 2006 fiscal
year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112
million in licensing and other revenues.[65] Google is able to precisely track users' interests
across affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology[66] and Google Analytics.[67] Google's
advertisements carry a lower price tag when their human ad-rating team working around
the world believes the ads improve the company's user experience.[68] Google AdWords
allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google's search results and the Google
Content Network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme.[69] Google
AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every
time ads are clicked.[70] Google began in March 2009 to use behavioral targeting based on
users' interests.[71]
Google has also been criticized by advertisers regarding its inability to combat click fraud,
when a person or automated script is used to generate a charge on an advertisement
without really having an interest in the product. Industry reports in 2006 claim that
approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.[72]
In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have
allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on their web pages. The alliance between
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the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S.
Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November, 2008.[73][74]
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Software
The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. As of August 2007,
Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of
Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%).[75] Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that
users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and
operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any
specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other
search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google
Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.
In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which allowed users to both upload
videos, and search and watch videos from the larger Internet.[76] In 2009 uploads to Google
video were discontinued.[77]
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa,
SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial
imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed
images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly.
Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications;
contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the
physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases,
government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily
frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and
even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A
number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by
geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.[78]
Google has promoted their products in various ways. In London, Google Space was set-up in
Heathrow Airport, showcasing several products, including Gmail, Google Earth and
Picasa.[79][80] Also, a similar page was launched for American college students, under the
name College Life, Powered by Google.[81]
In 2007, some reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile
phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone.[82][83][84] The project, called Android,
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turned out not to be a phone, but an operating system. It provides a standard development
kit that will allow any "Android" phone to run software developed for the Android SDK, no
matter the phone manufacturer. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the first phone
running the Android platform, the G1.
Google Translate aka Google Language Tools is a server-side machine translation service,
which can translate 35 different languages to each other, forming 595 language pairs.
Browser extension tools (such as Firefox extensions) allow for easy access to Google
Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques from translated
documents, (such as United Nations documents,[citation needed] which are professionally
translated) to extract translations accurate up to 88 percent. A "suggest a better translation"
feature appears with the original language text in a pop-up text field, allowing users to
indicate where the current translation is incorrect or else inferior to another translation.
On 1 September 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google Chrome,
an open-source web browser,[85] which was released on 2 September 2008.
On 7 July 2009, Google announced the project to develop Google Chrome OS, an opensource Linux-based operating system in a "window of opportunity"[86][87].
Gmail
Main article: Gmail
Gmail is a free webmail, POP3 and IMAP service provided by Google. In the United Kingdom
and Germany, it is officially called Google Mail.
Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became
available to the general public on February 7, 2007. As of July 2009 it has 146 million users
monthly. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of
the Google Apps suite.
With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the
webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time.
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The service currently offers over 7350 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging
from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.
In February 2006, Google released Gmail Chat, using the same tools used in Google Talk.
Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet
forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming
technique.
Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux.
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Enterprise Products
Google entered the Enterprise market in February, 2002 with the launch of its Google
Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology to larger organizations.[88]
Providing search for a smaller document repository, Google launched the Mini in 2005.
Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers with
an advertising-free window into Google.com's index.[89] In 2008, Google re-branded its next
version of Custom Search Business Edition as Google Site Search.[89]
In 2007, Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a version of Google Apps targeted
primarily at the business user. It includes such extras as more disk space for e-mail, API
access, and premium support, for a price of $50 per user per year. A large implementation
of Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario,
Canada.[90]
Also in 2007, Google acquired Postini[91] and continued to sell the acquired technology[92]
as Google Security Services.[93]
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Platform
Main article: Google platform
Google runs its services on several server farms, each comprising thousands of low-cost
commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company
divulges no details of its hardware, a 2006 estimate cites 450,000 servers, "racked up in
clusters at data centers around the world."[94] The company has about 24 server farms
around the world of various configurations. The farm in The Dalles, Oregon is powered by
hydroelectricity at about 50 megawatts.[95]
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Corporate affairs and culture
Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Google is known for its informal
corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator.
In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best
places to work.[6] Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you
can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should
be challenging and the challenge should be fun."[96]
Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards.[97] For example,
some system administrators earn no more than $35,000 per year – considered to be quite
low for the Bay Area job market.[98] However, Google's stock performance following its IPO
has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the
corporation's remarkable equity growth.[99]
After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry
Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to $1.[100] Subsequent
offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because,
"their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in
Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock
price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder
interests."[100] Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin
each earned a salary of $150,000.[dubious – discuss][100]
They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's
board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported
that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of $18.5 billion each.[101]
In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives.
Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook[102]
along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007.[103] In March
2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities.
Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of
Facebook[104] while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO
of Netshops Inc.[105]
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Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns
over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores
"personal information for 18 months" and by comparison, AOL (Time Warner) "retain[s]
search requests for 13 months"[106], and Yahoo! 90 days.[107]
U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user
data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against
Google.[108][109] Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to
protect YouTube users' personal data in the $1 billion copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it
will make user information and Internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary
anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other
litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the
Scottish Premier League.[110][111] The deal however did not extend the anonymity to
employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal
material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be
made available to the court.[112]
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Googleplex
The Googleplex Main article: Googleplex
Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, is referred to as "the Googleplex" in a
play of words; a googolplex being 1010100, or a one followed by a googol of zeros, and the
HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a
piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The
hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate
recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include
a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a
massage room, assorted video games, foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping
pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and
drinks.[113]
In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet (28,900 m2) of office space in New York
City, at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan.[114] The office was specially designed and built for
Google and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in
securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL.[114] In 2003, they
added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100
engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others.[114] It is
estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent and is similar in design
and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and
ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area.[114] In November 2006, Google opened
offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh.[115] By late 2006, Google also
established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[116]
Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October
2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6
megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy
needs.[117] The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S.
corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.[117] Google
has faced accusations in Harper's Magazine[118] of being extremely excessive with their
energy usage, and were accused of employing their "Don't be evil" motto as well as their
very public energy saving campaigns as means of trying to cover up or make up for the
massive amounts of energy their servers actually require.
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In 2009 Google announced it was deploying herds of goats to keep grassland around the
Googleplex short, helping to prevent the threat from seasonal bush fires while also reducing
the carbon footprint of mowing the extensive grounds.[119][120]
Innovation Time Off
As a motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are
encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest
them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense
originated from these independent endeavors.[121] In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa
Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her
analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.[122]
Easter eggs and April Fool's Day jokes
Main article: Google's hoaxes
Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes—such as Google MentalPlex, which
allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web.[123] In 2002, they claimed
that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine.[124] In 2004, they
featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon),[125] and in 2005, a
fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced.[126] In 2006, they
came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service.[127] In 2007, Google
announced two joke products. The first was a free wireless Internet service called TiSP
(Toilet Internet Service Provider)[128] in which one obtained a connection by flushing one
end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting only an hour for a "Plumbing
Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)" to connect it to the Internet.[128] Additionally, Google's Gmail
page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, which allows users of their free email
service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address.[129]
Google's services contain a number of Easter eggs; for instance, the Language Tools page
offers the search interface in the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker"
(actually leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, and Klingon.[130] In addition, the search engine calculator
provides the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams' The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[131] As Google’s search box can be used as a unit
converter (as well as a calculator), some non-standard units are built in, such as the Smoot.
A newly discovered easter egg is the spell-checker's result for the properly spelled word
"recursion". The spell-checker built into Google search returns "Did you mean: recursion?"
in a recursive link back to the same page.[132] Google also routinely modifies its logo in
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Blasco, Dhaliwal, Kim
accordance with various holidays or special events throughout the year, such as Christmas,
Mother's Day, or the birthdays of various notable individuals.[133]
IPO and culture
Many people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in the
company's culture,[134] because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions
and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company's employees would
suddenly become millionaires on paper. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders
Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company's
culture.[135] Later Mr. Page said, "We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the
fun elements. We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it's important to
have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices.
We like this set of buildings because it's more like a densely packed university campus than
a typical suburban office park."[136]
However, many analysts[who?] are finding that as Google grows, the company is becoming
more "corporate". In 2005, articles in The New York Times and other sources began
suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[137][138][139] In an
effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google has designated a Chief Culture
Officer in 2006, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the
Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true
to the core values that the company was founded on in the beginning—a flat organization
with a collaborative environment.[140]
Google has faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[141][142]
Philanthropy
Main article: Google.org
In 2004, Google formed a not for-profit philanthropic wing, Google.org, with a start-up fund
of $1 billion.[143] The express mission of the organization is to create awareness about
climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects is to
develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg. The founder is Dr
Larry Brilliant[144] and the current director is Megan Smith.[145]
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In 2008 Google announced its "project 10^100" which accepted ideas for how to help the
community and then will allow Google users to vote on their favorites.[146]
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Network Neutrality
Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality. According to Google's Guide to Net
Neutrality:
"Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content
they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated
according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is
about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be
permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or
content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call
or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power
to control activity online." [147]
On February 7, 2006, Vinton Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol (IP), and current
Vice President and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google, in testimony before Congress, said,
"allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally
undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."[148]
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Top Web Source
Google Search Engines
Special Google Search
Engines
Essential Resources
Google Maps
Google website
optimizer
7 Free resources
Google resource center
20 Resources for
Google Analytic
Google Resources
Google website
optimizer
Insights for search
Webmaster tool
Webmaster tutorial
Google Earth
Resources
Google Analytics
Learning Resources
Roundup
Source
Axandra
URL
http://www.free-seo-news.com/google-resource-page.htm
Stepcase Lifehack
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/essential-resources-forgoogle-maps.html
http://www.grokdotcom.com/googlewebsiteoptimizer/
Futurenow
Developer force
Search Engine Guide
Web Rank Info
Smallbusinessnewz
http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Google_Resource_Center
http://www.searchengineguide.com/manoj-jasra/20-resources-forgoogle-analytics.php
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/resources.php
http://www.smallbusinessnewz.com/topnews/2009/08/17/10google-resources-business-owners-shouldnt-overlook
Youtube
GIS Lounge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr0uWaZlC2Y
http://gislounge.com/google-earth-resources/
Lunametrics
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/07/08/google-analyticslearning-resources-roundup/
A
Adaptive Path · 9
Adsense for Mobile · 10
Android · 14
Andy Bechtolsheim · 6, 8
AOL · 10, 19, 20
AOL of Time Warner · 10
B
BackRub · 6
behavioral targeting · 12
C
Chicago Sun-Times · 9
click fraud · 12
Creative Commons · 2, 3, 4
Custom Search Business
Edition · 16
Google · 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Google Analytics · 11
Google Apps Premier Edition ·
16
Google Chrome OS · 14
Google Content Network · 11
Google Earth · 9, 11, 13
Google Groups · 13
Google Gulp · 21
Google Maps · 13, 20
Google News · 13, 21
Google Product Search · 13
Google Space · 13
Googleplex · 2, 5, 7, 20, 21
Googol · 5
Goto.com · 7
GrandCentral · 10
H
L
Larry Page · 5, 6, 7, 18, 22
London Stock Exchange · 8
M
Marissa Mayer · 21
Measure Map · 9
MySpace · 11, 20
N
NASA Ames Research Center ·
10
NASDAQ · 8
O
Harper's Magazine · 20
hundred best places to work ·
18
On2 Technologies · 10
Overture Services · 7
I
P
iGoogle · 8
Internet · 5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 19,
21, 24
Postini · 10, 16
J
Rankdex · 6
D
dMarc · 9
DoubleClick · 10, 11
E
Easter eggs · 2, 21
Eric Schmidt · 18
JotSpot · 9
F
Forbes · 18
Fortune Magazine · 5, 18
G
GGEA · 8
Gmail · 2, 5, 13, 14, 15, 21
GOOG · 8
K
Keyhole, Inc · 9
Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers and Sequoia Capital ·
8
R
S
Sergey Brin · 5, 6, 18, 22
server farms · 17
share · 4, 8, 10, 13, 22
Silicon Graphics · 6, 7
Sun Microsystems · 6, 8, 10
Introduction to Google
Blasco, Dhaliwal, Kim
W
Y
Z
Web Search technology · 13
Yahoo! · 7, 8, 12, 13, 19
YouTube · 9, 18, 19
Zingku.mobi · 10
Wikipedia · 2, 3, 4, 5
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