Google.com
What is Google? Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life, chances are you have at least heard of google, if not used it. Google is by far the biggest and mostknown search engine on the web today. You see it referenced in movies and tv shows, and it is even quite common to hear someone answer a question by saying “just google it”. But just exactly what is Google?
Google is a search engine for the world wide web. What a search engine does is index websites and then sorts them by what keywords they think are relevant for each site. Googles algorithm for ranking sites is some what complex, which helps searchers find what they are really looking for. No search engine is perfect, but Google is by far the best. This is what caused Google to become the number one search engine for the world wide web in a relatively short amount of time, and why it is still the best search engine out there.
Google started in 1996, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a couple of kids at Standford University. They wanted to create a functional search engine, as the ones that existed at that point in time were not all that grand. It actually just started as a research project in 1996, and was originally names “backrub”. The whole concept was to rank sites by the number of backlinks the site had, or how many sites were “rubbing their back”.
It didnt take long for google to incorporate, which was in 1998. It was really like a snowballing effect. In 1999, they moved into some offices in Palo Alto, commonly known as silicon valley. But they didnt stop there. By 2003, they moved to where they are still today, in Mountain View California. They eventually bought the complex from SGI for a whopping $319 million dollars. Dont worry, Im sure Google could afford it.
But how does a search engine company have that kind of money to throw around? Well, because of their advertising program, known as Adwords. Adwords itself is a very complex system. So what exactly is Adwords, and how does it work? Well, next time you do a search on Google, pay attention to the very top and right side of the page. Those are adwords ads. And depending on what you were searching for, those ads can cost the advertiser a lot, or a little bit of money. You see, how adwords works is a business or individual will pay a certain amount anytime a searcher clicks on the ad, whether the seacher buys something or not. This system accounts for 99% of Googles revenue. And it continues to make them a lot of money because it works extremely well.
Google also has a bunch of other services they make readily available for users, most of which are free. A popular application is gmail, Googles free web based email service. It rivals the popular MSN Hotmail in many ways, such as offering more storage space per email account. They also have several desktop applications, like google desktop and google earth, both free as well.
Another interesting tool offered by google is google maps. It by far beats mapquest handsdown. Not only does it do pretty much everything mapquest does, but it also allows you to use “street view” on most streets. This will zoom in to the street level and you will see it as if you are actually on the street. That is one of many cool features of google maps.
Google also has many partnerships with government agencies and other companies, like NASA and Fox Interactive Media. Google is also working with LIFE magazine by hosting an archive of the magazines photographs.
And Im sure at one point in time you have asked yourself, why the name Google? Its such an odd name. Well, it originated from misspelling the word googol, which is 10^100, the number represented by a 1 followed by a hundred zeros. Considering the guys who started google were math wizs, this name does seem to be appropriate.
So how does google stand up to the other search engines? Well, in 2007, google controlled 53.6% of the search engine market share, while yahoo only had 19.9%, and live, which is now bing, only had 12.9%. That means that more then half of all searches done on the web are done through google. And I would dare to say that number had probably increased since 2007 as google continues to tweak their algorithm to improve the user experience.
I guess the last question would be, will anyone ever be able to bring down the mulit-billion dollar jagurnat known as google? I dont see it happening anytime soon.
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