Research
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Google
History
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they
were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. While conventional search
engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page,
the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.
They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by
the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original
site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy. Page and
Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked
backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google,
originating from a misspelling of the word "googol, the number one followed by one
hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was
to handle. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain
google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and
the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, at a friend's garage in Menlo Park,
California.
Google 1998
Growth
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto,
California, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology
startups.The next year, against Page and Brin's initial opposition
toward an advertising-funded search engine, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords. In order to
maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed,
advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based
on a combination of price bids and clickthroughs, with bidding
starting at five cents per click. This model of selling keyword
advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin off
created by Bill Gross. When the company changed names to
Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click
and bidding patents. Overture Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed
Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court, with Google agreeing to
issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.
During this time, Google was granted a patent describing their PageRank mechanism. The
patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists
Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after outgrowing two
other locations, the company leased their current office
complex from Silicon Graphics at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
in Mountain View, California. The complex has since come to be
known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the
number one followed by a googol zeroes. Three years later,
Google would buy the property from SGI for $319 million. By
that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday
language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the
Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English
Dictionary, denoted as "to use the Google search engine to
obtain information on the Internet."
I made a Referendum on 20 student of PY and that was the results:
Which search engine you use it:
Google :13 students.
Yahoo : 4 students .
MSN : 2 students.
ASK : 1 student.
Products and services
Advertising
Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is derived from
its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the
company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising
revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other
revenues. Google has implemented various innovations
in the online advertising market that helped propel them
to one of the biggest advertisers in the market. Using technology from the company
DoubleClick, Google can determine user interests and target advertisements appropriately
so they are relevant to the context they are in and the user that is viewing them. Google
Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, allowing
for in-depth research into getting users to go where you want them to go.
Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program.
Google's AdWords allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content
network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme.The sister service, Google
AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website, and earn
money every time ads are clicked. One of the disadvantages and criticisms of this program is
Google's inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script "clicks" on
advertisements without being interested in the product, just to earn money for the website
owner. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in
fact fraudulent or invalid. 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 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.
Search engine
The Google web search engine is the company's most
popular service. According to market research published
by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant
search engine in the United States market, with a market
share of 65.6%.Google indexes billions of Web pages, so
that users can search for the information they desire,
through the use of keywords and operators. This basic
search engine has spread to specific services as well, including an image search engine, the
Google News search site, Google Maps, and more. In early 2006, the company launched
Google Video, which allowed users to upload, search, and watch videos from the Internet. In
2009, however, uploads to Google Video were discontinued. The company even developed
Google Desktop, a desktop search application used to search for files local to one's
computer.
One of the more controversial search services Google hosts is Google Books. The company
began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into
their new book search engine. However, a number of copyright disputes arose, and Google
reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the U.K.,
Australia and Canada. Furthermore, the Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009,
asking them to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from their database. In
competition with Amazon.com, Google plans to sell digital versions of new books.
Other products.
Other products
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,
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. In 2007, some reports surfaced that Google was planning the release
of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone. The project, called
Android, turned out not to be a phone but an operating system for mobile devices, which
Google released as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license. Google provides a
standard development kit for developers so applications can be
created to be run on Android-based phone. In September 2008, TMobile released the G1, the first Android-based phone. More than a
year later on January 5, 2010, Google released an Android phone
under its own company name called the Nexus One.
On September 1, 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming
availability of Google Chrome, an open-source web browser, which
was released on September 2, 2008.
On May 27, 2009, Google announced plans to develop Google Wave,
a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts
conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work
together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and much more. Google Wave is
currently still in what the company calls "preview mode," in which a potential user must
request access last2= first2= from Google to be given a Wave account.
On 7 July 2009, Google announced the project to develop Google Chrome OS, an opensource Linux-based operating system in a "window of opportunity".
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.
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. In 2008, Google re-branded its next
version of Custom Search Business Edition as Google Site Search.
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.
Also in 2007, Google acquired Postini and continued to sell the acquired technology as
Google Security Services.
Researched by YAZEED SAUD AL-KHATHLAN
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All these information are from Wikipedia®
www.wikipedia.com