Google Matters

Google is one of the most remarkable success stories of the world of business. Just as the brand name “Hoover” came to become a verb, as in “to do the hoovering”, the brand name Google has become a verb. Want to find something out? Just Google it. The Google company has gone from being a couple of students in a garage, into one of the most important businesses on the planet. Google matters, because the page ranking system can make or break a business depending on its position from a Google search. In addition, campaigning organisations need a good ranking on a Google search for their issue to get their message across.

Google went public in a share issue in 2004 at 85 dollars a share. A year later, those shares were worth 300 dollars each, and Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page became overnight billionaires. Their company is now a rival to Microsoft. Ironically Brin and Page were students at Stanford University in a part of the campus sponsored by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. The students took the huge risk to give up their studies to found Google, after being turned down by a number of companies they took their search engine concept to. Brin and Page found financial backers and the rest is history. Google search is powered by thousands of customised personal computers linked together with patented technology. The founders of Google constantly download and trawl the world wide web for new pages, and use a secret algorithm to produce their page ranking system.

Google now licences use of its search engine to other companies. However much of the enormous earnings of Google come from its Adwords programme. Businesses bid against each other to place their adverts next to Google’s search results. The keywords for important words “sell” for high sums. Businesses pay Google each time someone clicks on their advertisement, and the money rolls in for Google. There have been some problems with malicious clicking on rival advertisements by unethical firms, but Adwords remains an increasingly important source of revenue for Google as advertising budgets move from the printed word into the internet.

Google also operates a programme called Adsense in which business can have a section of  Google’s automatically contextualised adverts on their pages, and earn revenue each time someone clicks on one of the adverts, a phenomenon referred to as "Googlecash".. This revenue is an important source of income for a growing range of businesses, and these businesses have a vested interest in the continuing success of Google.

One of the attractions of Google is that it has an alternative approach to business. One of the Google catchphrases is:

“Don’t be evil”. Google founders are young idealists, who have rejected opportunities when they could have sold out for even more money, and they reject lucrative opportunities like advertising from the pornography industry. Google comes across as a family-friendly company that looks after its employees with free food and good childcare. The "Googleplex" at the heart of Google has been described as a fun place to work which is more like a university campus than a multinational company.

Google has expanded from its initial focus on search, with amazing innovations like Google Earth and a project to scan in millions of books into a searchable database.  Google is also exploring the field of biotechnology and the entertainment industry. It is still a young company, which will no doubt pull more surprises in years to come. There have been rocky times for Google such as the controversy over G-mail in which it was realised that Google would have huge power in knowing what people were emailing each other about. Similarly, with knowledge about searches, Google’s immense power brings considerable responsibilities. There was recent controversy over Google’s expansion into China, when the company agreed to censor its searches to limit information for examples about Tibet or the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But above all, Google remains a search engine. It is one that has built up a lot of loyalty from its users, partly because its page ranking system is so much better than alternatives like Alta Vista, Excite or Yahoo. But also, because in a world where big companies are more powerful than many nation states, Google comes across as a business with an ethical dimension that cares about people and the world we live in.

For a history of the Google Company, visit their website.