Google Inc. Case Study

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American multinational Internet and software corporation specialized in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. It hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[5] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[6][7] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both attending Stanford University.

Google 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 20 years, until the year 2024.[8] The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[9] and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".[10][11] 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 the Gmail email service, the Google Docs office suite, and the Google+ social networking service. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the Google Chrome web browser, the Picasa photo organizing and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system,[12] found on specialized laptops called Chromebooks.

Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world,[13] and process over one billion search requests[14] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[15][16][17][18] As of September 2009 Alexa listed the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites as being in the top hundred, as well as several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger and Orkut.[19] Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.[20] The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.[21][22]

Contents [hide]

1 History

1.1 Financing and initial public offering

1.2 Growth

1.3 Acquisitions and partnerships

1.4 Google Data Centers

2 Products and services

2.1 Advertising

2.2 Search engine

2.3 Productivity tools

2.4 Enterprise products

2.5 Other products

3 Corporate affairs and culture

3.1 Employees

3.2 Googleplex

3.3 Easter eggs and April Fools' Day jokes

3.4 Philanthropy

3.5 Network neutrality

3.6 Privacy

4 See also

5 References

6 External links

HistoryMain article: History of Google

Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not experienced in HTML, the language for designing web pages.[23]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.[24]

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.[25] 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.[26][27]

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[28] The technology in RankDex would be patented[29] and used later when Li founded