Google Inc.

Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of December 31, 2008, the company has 20,222 full-time employees.

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google, the latter resulting in being identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work. The unofficial company slogan is “Don’t be evil”, although criticism of Google includes concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, copyright, censorship and discontinuation of services. According to Millward Brown, it is the most powerful brand in the world.

Trivia

• “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.
• They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
  The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface.
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
• Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
• On Jan 31, 2009, between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. Google flags every search results with the message “This site may harm your computer”.
• Google announces a $125 million deal that settles a lawsuit with publishers that had sued it over its book search. Not only does it put the search feature in the clear, but it may see Google become a major retailer of out-of-print books.
• Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
• Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
• They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
• They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
• Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

Products

• See Google Pruducts

Videos

Other Information

• Founded  Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) Sergey Brin, Larry Page
• Headquarters  Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served  Worldwide
• Key people  Eric E. Schmidt, (Chairman) & (CEO), Sergey Brin (Technology President), Larry Page (Products President)
• Industry  Internet, Computer software
• Market cap  US$ 96.472 Billion – At market close on January 22, 2009
• Revenue  ▲31.3% US$ 21.796 Billion (2008)
• Employees  20,222 – December 31, 2008

Competitors

• Yahoo!
• Ask.com
• Microsoft Live Search

Links

• About Google – Links to numerous Google resources.
• Product descriptions – Categorized listing with links.
• More Google products – A variety of Google tools.
• Google Press Center – News and public information.
• Executive Management – Our executives and board of directors.
• Corporate Addresses – Locations around the world.
• Investor Relations – Financial and corporate governance information.
• Ten things – Our philosophy.
• Help page – Support for Google products.
• Jobs at Google – Positions available in many locations.
• Contact us – Links to various business units.
• Official Site: Philanthropic Branch Google.org
• Website  Google.com

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