Company Overview
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.
When you visit www.google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you’ll be able to find information in many different languages; check stock quotes, maps, and news headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search billions of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages — more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.
We also provide ways to access all this information without making a special trip to the Google homepage. The Google Toolbar enables you to conduct a Google search from anywhere on the web, while the Google Deskbar (beta) puts a Google search box in the Windows taskbar so you can search from any application you’re using, without opening a browser. And for those times when you’re away from your PC altogether, Google can be used from a number of wireless platforms including WAP and i-mode phones.
Google’s utility and ease of use have made it one of the world’s best known brands almost entirely through word of mouth from satisfied users. As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it. We believe you should know when someone has paid to put a message in front of you, so we always distinguish ads from the search results or other content on a page. We don’t sell placement in the search results themselves, or allow people to pay for a higher ranking there.
Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products and services on the web with targeted advertising, and we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.
To learn more about Google, click on the link at the left for the area that most interests you. Or type what you want to find into our search box and hit enter. Once you do, you’ll be on your way to understanding why others say, “Google is the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine.”
What’s a Google?
“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
Technology Overview
Google stands alone in its focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” To that end, Google has persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, Google developed its own serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.
From the beginning, Google’s developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, Google employed linked PCs to quickly find each query’s answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It’s an idea that others have since copied, while Google has continued to refine its back-end technology to make it even more efficient.
The software behind Google’s search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.
- PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google’s technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.
- Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.
Google’s innovations don’t stop at the desktop. To bring its accurate and speedy search results to users accessing the web through portable devices, Google also pioneered the first wireless search technology for on-the-fly translation of HTML to formats optimized for WAP, i-mode, J-SKY, and EZWeb. Currently, Google provides its wireless technology to numerous market leaders, including AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS, Nextel, Palm, Handspring, and Vodafone, among others.
Life of a Google Query
The life span of a Google query normally lasts less than half a second, yet involves a number of different steps that must be completed before results can be delivered to a person seeking information.
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3. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second. |
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1. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book – it tells which pages contain the words that match the query. |
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2. The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result. |
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Business Overview
As with its technology, Google has chosen to ignore conventional wisdom in designing its business. The company started with seed money from angel investors and brought together two competing venture capital firms to fund its first equity round. While the dotcom boom exploded around it and competitors spent millions on marketing campaigns to “build brand,” Google focused instead on quietly building a better search engine.
The word quickly spread from one satisfied user to another. With superior search technology and a high volume of traffic at its Google.com site, Google’s managers identified two initial opportunities for generating revenue: search services and advertising.
Google grows and business blooms
Over time, these two business lines evolved into complementary networks. Google AdWords advertisers create ads to drive qualified traffic to their sites and generate leads. Google publishing partners deliver those ads targeted to relevant search results powered by Google AdSense. With AdSense, the publisher shares in the revenue generated when readers click on the ads.
For sites wishing to have more control over their intranet or site searches, Google developed the Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure appliance that delivers accurate search results across any number of documents.
Google continues to think about ways in which technology can improve upon existing ways of doing business. New areas are explored, ideas prototyped and budding services nurtured to make them more useful to advertisers and publishers. However, no matter how distant Google’s business model grows from its origins, the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.
Google AdWords for Advertisers
Google designed AdWords for advertisers who want to reach a qualified audience as efficiently as possible. Advertisers select their own target keywords and only pay when customers click on their ads. It’s easy to create ad text and manage online advertising accounts with no large upfront payment required. All that’s needed is five minutes and a credit card. The ads appear across Google’s growing roster of partners, including thousands of sites from America Online to the Washington Post, and are targeted to relevant search and content pages.
Google’s experienced sales and service team optimize campaigns for our larger advertisers. Our staff of AdWords experts work with advertisers to select the appropriate keywords and generate the matching creative, then carefully monitor the campaign to improve its performance over time by winnowing keywords and rewriting copy based on what is most effective. There’s no limit to the number of keywords that an advertiser can select and each keyword can be matched with a different creative execution. Recent advertisers include Amazon, Cisco Systems and Staples.
Google provides all of its advertisers with a full complement of reporting services to enable fine tuning of campaigns and real-time intelligence about which components are performing best. Advertisers can further increase efficiencies by targeting their campaigns to specific geographies or languages.
Google AdSense and Web Site Services
Google believes relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content. And that advertising can enhance the experience for visitors to a publisher’s website, while helping publishers recover some of their investment in creating content of value. Google AdSense™ combines Google Search technology with our base of keyword advertisers to deliver ads that precisely target search results or the content on a site’s pages, no matter how specialized the subject matter. Advertisers, publishers, and information seekers all profit as a result.
Signing up for AdSense is easy — it only takes a few minutes to apply. And our sales team helps customize the program for sites receiving more than 20 million page views a month.
- AdSense serves relevant ads on content pages search result and content pages as well as dormant domain pages.Google Search Services enable publishers to provide Google web search on their own pages – results that can be used to generate revenue with the AdSense for Search program The Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure device that provides Google quality search across an individual website or intranet.
- Google Wireless Services deliver Google search results via PDAs, wireless phones and other mobile devices powered by many of the world’s leading wireless service providers.
The Google Culture
Though growing rapidly, Google still maintains a small company feel. At the Googleplex headquarters almost everyone eats in the Google café (known as “Charlie’s Place”), sitting at whatever table has an opening and enjoying conversations with Googlers from all different departments. Topics range from the trivial to the technical, and whether the discussion is about computer games or encryption or ad serving software, it’s not surprising to hear someone say, “That’s a product I helped develop before I came to Google.”
Google’s emphasis on innovation and commitment to cost containment means each employee is a hands-on contributor. There’s little in the way of corporate hierarchy and everyone wears several hats. The international webmaster who creates Google’s holiday logos spent a week translating the entire site into Korean. The chief operations engineer is also a licensed neurosurgeon. Because everyone realizes they are an equally important part of Google’s success, no one hesitates to skate over a corporate officer during roller hockey.
Google’s hiring policy is aggressively non-discriminatory and favors ability over experience. The result is a staff that reflects the global audience the search engine serves. Google has offices around the globe and Google engineering centers are recruiting local talent in locations from Zurich to Bangalore. Dozens of languages are spoken by Google staffers, from Turkish to Telugu. When not at work, Googlers pursue interests from cross-country cycling to wine tasting, from flying to frisbee. As Google expands its development team, it continues to look for those who share an obsessive commitment to creating search perfection and having a great time doing it.
About the Googleplex
Google’s world headquarters building is located in Mountain View, California, a stone’s throw from the Shoreline Regional Park wetlands. While not all Google offices around the globe are equally well-stocked, these are some of the essential elements that define a Google workspace:
- Lobby Décor – Piano, lava lamps, and live projection of current search queries from around the world.
- Hallway Décor – Bicycles and large rubber exercise balls on the floors, press clippings from around the world posted on bulletin boards everywhere. Many Googlers standing around discussing arcane IP addressing issues and how to build a better spam filter.
- Googler Offices – Googlers work in high density clusters remarkably reflective of our server setup, with three or four staffers sharing spaces with couches and dogs. This improves information flow and saves on heating bills.
- Equipment – Most Googlers have high powered Linux OS workstations on their desktops. In Google’s earliest days, desks were wooden doors mounted on two sawhorses. Some of these are still in use within the engineering group.
- Recreation Facilities – Workout room with weights and rowing machine, locker rooms, washers and dryers, massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, baby grand piano, pool table, ping pong, roller hockey twice a week in the parking lot.
- Google Café – Healthy lunches and dinners for all staff. Stations include “Charlie’s Grill,” “Back to Albuquerque,” “East Meets West” and “Vegheads.” Outdoor seating for sunshine daydreaming.
- Snack Rooms – Bins packed with various cereals, gummi bears, M&Ms, toffee, licorice, cashew nuts, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit and other snacks. Dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda and make-your-own cappuccino.
- Coolest stop on the tour – A three-dimensional rotating image of the world on permanent display on a large flat panel monitor in the office of the engineer who created it. What makes it special is the toggle switch that allows you to view points of light representing real time searches rising from the surface of the globe toward space, color coded by language. Toggle and you can see traffic patterns for the entire Internet. Worth a trip to the second floor.
- Nearest 24 hour doughnut shop – Krispy Kreme, Mountain View, CA.
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