Overview of Google INC

Part of Dasha 

1. Overview of Google INC

Introduction

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates.

It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel and supported by Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy smartphone series', as well as the new Google Chrome OS, best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48 and also, since 15 June 2011, on commercial Chromebooks such as the Samsung Series 5 and Acer AC700.

It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.

Now Google is not just the world's largest and most popular web search engine. Google provides multiple web services, desktop software products, and even their own branded Lava Lamps. 

Some history

Beginning in 1996, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine called “BackRub” that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages. By 1998 they had formalized their work, creating the company you know today as Google.

Since then, Google has grown by leaps and bounds. From offering search in a single language we now offer dozens of products and services—including various forms of advertising and web applications for all kinds of tasks—in scores of languages. And starting from two computer science students in a university dorm room, we now have thousands of employees and offices around the world.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built “Google,” a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  

Google‘s first logo doodle for Burning Man festival, August 1998.  

Today Google offers us a lot of products as Google Chrome,Google’s services and now they make easier to use the Google products, like Google Maps or Gmail, right from a phone.

Google is also working to drive innovation so that more people can use better and cheaper mobile devices to access the Internet. With the Open Handset Alliance, they developed Android, the platform that any mobile developer can use and any hardware manufacturer can install on a device.

In 2006, they also acquired YouTube, which lets billions of people discover, watch and share original videos as well as professional content.  

2. The main aspects of Google’s phylosophie

The fundamental Google's technlogy – Google Search 

Google's first and main mission of this work – is to show you all diversity of Google’s popular product – Google Tools. But we will start by taking a look on their first “child” and their main technology – Google search. Why it works so well and which objectives the Google’s fathers try to attain?

Co-founder Larry Page once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”  We can’t claim that Google delivers on that vision 100 percent today, but they’re always working on new technologies aimed at bringing all of Google closer to that ideal. Before you even enter your query in the search box, Google is continuously traversing the web in real time with software programs called crawlers, or “Googlebots”. A crawler visits a page, copies the content and follows the links from that page to the pages linked to it, repeating this process over and over until it has crawled billions of pages on the web.

Describing the basic crawling, indexing and serving processes of a search engine is just part of the story. The other key ingredients of Google search are:

• Relevance.  – «we want to give you back exactly what you want.» When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data.
• Comprehensiveness. Google launched in 1998 with just 25 million pages, which even then was a small fraction of the web. Today they index billions and billions of webpages, and their index is roughly 100 million gigabytes.
• Freshness. In the early days, Googlebots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant that the information you found on Google typically was out of date.
• Speed. Their average query response time is roughly one-fourth of a second. Speed is a major search priority, which is why in general they don’t turn on new features if they will slow our services down. In addition to smart coding, on the back end they’ve developed distributed computing systems around that globe that ensure you get fast response times. With technologies like autocomplete and Google Instant, they help you find the search terms and results you’re looking for before you’re even finished typing.

Google’s  strategy

“The perfect search engine,” says co-founder Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” When Google began, you would have been pleasantly surprised to enter a search query and immediately find the right answer.

But technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will never be solved, Google continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access, whether they’re at a desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok. As company keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide their actions.

Google wrote these “10 things” several years ago. From time to time they revisit this list to see if it still holds true. (September 2009)

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 
   Since the beginning, Google focused on providing the best user experience possible. A homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. 
   With one of the world‘s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, Google knows what they do well, and how they could do it better. Their hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow. 
   Today time is valuable now. So Google keeps speed in mind with each new product they release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web.
4. Democracy on the web works. 
   Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. 
   The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. Google is pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone.
6. You can make money without doing evil. 
   Google is a business. The revenue they generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google's site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content.
7. There’s always more information out there. 
   Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And google's researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world‘s information to people seeking answers.
8. The need for information crosses all borders. 
   Google offers Google‘s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible.
9. You can be serious without a suit. 
   They put great stock in employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. The atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
10. Great just isn’t good enough. 
    Through innovation and iteration,Google aims to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of their engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

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