Unit 2 Closing Case #2
Allison Arnold
April 28, 2008

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Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
The name Google is a play on words from the mathematical term “Googol” which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. This term reflects their mission of organizing the world’s information.

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Google’s primary line of business is its search engine; however it generates revenue from the marketers and advertisers that are paying to place their ads on the site.
AdWords launched in 2005 and accounts for the majority of Google’s annual revenue from over 150,000 advertisers.
AdWords allows advertisers to bid on common keywords and the maximum amount they want to pay per click, per day.

The normal life span of a
Google query lasts less than a half second.
1. The web server sends the query to the index servers.
2. The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents.
3. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.
Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tech.html

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Determine if Google’s search results are examples of transactional or analytical information.
◦ Transactional-encompasses all of the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks.
◦ Analytical-encompasses all organizational information and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks.
Google’s search results are analytical information

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Describe the impact on Google’s business if the search information it presented to its customers was of low quality.
◦ The business would suffer greatly because users would begin to distrust the results of their search and go elsewhere for more accurate information

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Explain how the Website
RateMyProfessors.com solved its problem of poor information.
◦ The goal of this website was to create a place where students could rank their teachers. Too many jokesters were giving false professor names leaving the information on the website questionable. The developers turned to Google to create an automatic verification tool.

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Identify the different types of entity classes that might be stored in Google’s indexing database.
◦ Entity class—(often called a table) is a selection of similar entities
(person, place or thing).
Person
Employee
FullTime
Manager

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Identify how Google might use a data warehouse to improve its business.
◦ Data warehouses store the same information as a database, but in an aggregated form more suited to supporting decision-making tasks.

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Explain why Google would need to cleanse the information in its data warehouse.
◦ Data warehouses can contain information from several different databases, some of which can be external to the organization. Having low quality information will have a negative impact on the company’s ability to make the right decisions.

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Identify a data mart that Google’s marketing and sales department might use to track and analyze its AdWords revenue.
◦ Pay per click
◦ Paid Sponsorship
◦ Paid Search

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Google reported revenues of $5.51 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2009
Google Translate is capable of automatic translation between 41 languages, covering
98% of the languages read by Internet users.
Google joined Twitter in February and now has over 500,000 followers.

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Google http://www.google.com
Haag, Stephen, Paige Baltzan, Amy Phillips. CIS 429 Business Driven Technology. Ed. Ann
Hayes. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008.