Assignment 7 (Due: January 30, 2010, before 01:00pm)

Google is a highly successful Internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools. Research Google’s business model and answer the following questions below. You may add additional information not included in these questions.

Questions:

Questions :
Explain Google’s business model.
1. Who are their competitors?
2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?
3. How competitive are they in the market?
4. What new services do they offer?
5. What makes them so unique?
6. How competitive are they in the international market?

Google Business Model

Internet is everywhere. It becomes omnipresent to our way of life. We can’t deny the fact that we rely on the internet to gather some information we need in our studies and to be updated in the latest issues the world has. It plays an important role to some students in dealing with their studies, to the businessman for advertising their company’s special offers and to the people who loves to travel around the world by just clicking the mouse. The biggest Internet benefit touted by proponents is that it’s available to anyone.

The Internet has had an incredible impact on world culture. Depending on how we look at it, some of its effects could be seen as advantages or disadvantages. IT also made communication extremely easy, no matter how far apart people are. It binds people closer by simply clicking the mouse and sending instant messages through emails. Inside the internet are some search engines that would be used in finding some information that would be needed by the users. One of them is the Google.

Google is a global information technology leader, innovating how people connect with information. Google’s automated search technology has made its free search engine website the number one visited website on the Internet. Google’s search products allow its users to efficiently search through vast amounts of web-based information, organizing and delivering results based on relevance. It also has a long and growing list of products in many other areas of computer applications. A good way to get many users interested in the search engine is making it really easy to use. Google believes they should hide the complexity of their powerful search engine from their users so that they will be left with a simple, understandable way to get the information they need.

What is the Google’s business model? As what I’ve read on Mike Elgan’s article, there's only one way to understand Google's business model, which is to understand that Google's services are not products. In fact, Google has only one product and that is us. Google makes billions of dollars in revenue each fiscal quarter. That money comes about by the same process that all companies use. They sell a product to their customers. Their customers pay money for that product. Advertisers are Google's customer. They improve their product by improving us. That's where Google Latitude comes in. Latitude represents merely the latest in a long string of Google offerings designed to
condition you for hard-core contextual advertising. First was the realization that our personal information is always available to anyone via an ordinary Google search. Google is building a better product by making the violation of their privacy desirable and by mainstreaming the use of technologies that used to exist only in cautionary science fiction. Thus it builds a better target for advertising. Google likes to be fair meaning they refuse to make money through search result ranking or inclusion. All of the advertising has to be on the right of the page, none in the actual search results. Likewise, Google only lets ads be displayed if they have something to do with the results page. Meaning certain searches might not include ads on the right. Google believes that these sponsored ads can help the user find what they want, which is why they have to be relevant to the search results. They want neutrality, there is no reason for one link to be before another one just because its owners paid more money. Unlike some of its competitors, Google provides inclusion and frequent updating in their sites for free. Meaning anybody’s website could be in the search results if their website is related to what the user typed in the search box. And this is great because it makes the search results completely accurate.

Although Google in its broadest perception has gained an unparalled marketplace acceptance, in the narrower search market its competitors are Yahoo and Microsoft. Yahoo and Google are battling over the same Web visitors and advertising dollars. These two companies are using very different approaches while going after the same advertising dollars. Yahoo uses human editors or “surfers” to organize web sites into categories. However humans cannot index everything so they are partnered up with a third party search engine to provide answers when its human – powered listing do not meet the requirements. Google is about its search engine, done only with PageRank. There is no human indexing involved. Yahoo has been using a program called the “Idea factory” to promote inventive thinking in their company, staffers are supposed to improve everything from the company’s products to its campus. On the other hand, Google assumes inventive thinking.

Another competitor is the Microsoft. Microsoft is also competing with Google because Google is now a major threat to their dominance. While Google was launching all of its products for free, Microsoft was trying to catch up in search doing a project which they spent millions on but Google and Yahoo keep on getting ahead with new innovations such as complete maps and satellite photos. Microsoft was always very powerful because it had control of the Windows operating system, they would decide which products and services consumers saw first. Moreover, Microsoft did not have to make better products than its competitors, just about equal.

Google is different. A unique mix of internally developed software, open source, made-to-order \ hardware, and people management is the secret behind the search engine. It's different not only because its thinking is original and its applications unique, witness search queries morphed into a lobby display of bursting color, but because the company's unconventional IT strategy makes it so. Commodity hardware and free software hardly seem like the seeds of an empire, yet Google has turned them into an unmatched distributed computing platform that supports its wildly popular search engine, plus a rapidly increasing number of applications. Google's great IT advantage is its ability to build high-performance systems that are cost efficient and that scale to massive workloads. Google managers tend to be restrained on the subject of IT strategy, they're reluctant to talk about specific vendors or products. But a day spent with some of the company's IT leaders reveals there's more to Google's IT operations than a search engine running on a massive server farm. Behind the seeming simplicity is a mash-up of internally developed software, made-to-order hardware, artificial intelligence, obsession with performance, and an unorthodox approach to people management. IT thus has a big role in making Google be the fastest search engine that would be used by many consumers. It would be a big help for them to have a better service that will be provided to the clients.

Google offers different products and services that would be rendered to the consumers. This includes desktop products, mobile products, web products, and hardware products. Some of them are Google Chrome, Blogger Mobile, Gmail, Google Latitude, Google Maps, Advertising (AdSense), Blogger, Youtube and Google Public DNS.

Google is a business. Besides trying its best to satisfy its users it has to find ways of generating the most revenue. Google does this in a few different ways. The first one is the advertising which happens on the right side of the page when you search on Google, a program called AdWords. The second one is offering its search technology to others and the third way to make money is through its Google Search Appliance which they sell to their customers. This appliance delivers accurate search results throughout a number of documents. Google is competitive enough when it comes to international market since most of the products and services offered are then used by many consumers.

Reference:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300292
http://internetbusinessmodels.org/googlebusinessmodel/

Competitors..

Yahoo! Inc.
MSN
AOL,
Inc.Disney OnlineMove,
Inc.Match.com, LLC
Sina Corp.
Daum Communications Corp.


information technology as an advantage..

Google CIO Ben Fried shares his thoughts on how IT leaders can influence corporate culture and differentiation via innovative technology choices.

When people talk about Google as a corporate entity, they often talk—jealously, at times—about the company’s innovative culture, with its sprawling campus, free meals and endless amenities.

One of the people at the forefront of that culture is Google’s CIO. Ben Fried believes that IT plays a pivotal role in building a great culture—and subsequently a great company—and he puts it into practice in a number of ways.

One part of that is making technology accessible and open. By giving users what they want—instead of what the company believes is best—Fried believes CIOs can empower employees to do more. “It’s almost insulting to people when they hear, ‘We know better than you how it’s best for you to work,’” he says. And the company benefits not only from the increased productivity and morale, but also when recruiting talented support professionals.

But it also puts a good face on IT. In an era in which business users believe their IT organizations take too long and spend too much for products and services that don’t meet their needs, CIOs and their teams need to make smarter decisions, he says.

Fried has gleaned these and other lessons from his time at Google, and from his previous work as an infrastructure architect at Morgan Stanley. Fried spoke recently about his IT leadership philosophy with CIO Insight Editor in Chief Brian P. Watson. What follows is an edited, condensed version of their discussion.

CIO Insight: You’ve worked in two industries—finance and technology—where IT is often a competitive advantage. What have you learned?

Fried: A lot of CIOs say their only job is to create competitive advantage for their company. I shade it a little differently. Creating competitive advantage is incredibly important, but I think you need to be aware that differentiation doesn’t necessarily have to limit itself to competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is one important way in which a company can differentiate itself.

But more and more, people need to understand the way IT becomes part of corporate culture. Part of establishing a great company is establishing a unique culture. It’s critical to find what defines your company and makes it different. It might not necessarily be making the product better or cheaper that creates competitive advantage. Technology has a unique opportunity to make your company different, and that’s what CIOs need to focus on.

One thing CIOs—and other executives, I’m sure—have a hard time with is that the things that got you into that seat have very little do with the things you need to do once you’re in it. You have to eliminate all sentimentality from yourself. It’s very easy to want to continue doing the things that got you to where you are, but you have to realize that you have to take a broader view of the company.

What other mistakes do CIOs run into when it comes to differentiation?

Fried:A lot of CIOs don’t get that there are different economies they can harness by forgetting the business of building out infrastructure. Infrastructure, in general, is rarely something that is a great differentiator. You have to carefully consider how many endeavors you want to be engaged in that are notable to your company only in their absence.

No one ever calls you up because packets were really fast today, or because they hit “send” in an e-mail client and the window disappeared right away. No one will ever thank you for doing those things. There are only so many things that any one organization or CIO can spend time on. How much time do you want to spend on things that aren’t noticeable? A lot of CIOs got started by building all this stuff out, so it’s really hard to look back and say, “Do I really need to keep doing this?”

At Morgan Stanley, we were very early customers of the Google search appliance. A lot of the young people there had their first exposure to productivity applications via Google Apps. That’s what they wanted. We gave them something else, which was more expensive and not what they wanted to deal with. It made me think: How do you deal with this, because there’s only so long you can give them the tools they don’t want and expect to get out of them everything they’re capable of.

It took my attention when I read this article from the internet. In fact, I have highlighted some of the lines from the interviewee. He said, a company has its edge if it focuses on the use of information technology. It will give a unique opportunity to make the company different from any other else.


Competitiveness..

I got this from a site where they considered this as their philosophy on why google became an advantage when it comes to using of information technologies and why they become competitive to in the market.

Our Philosophy
Ten things we know to be true
"The perfect search engine," says co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." When Google began, you would have been pleasantly surprised to enter a search query and immediately find the right answer. Google became successful precisely because we were better and faster at finding the right answer than other search engines at the time.
But technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will never be solved, we continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access, whether they're at a desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok. We've also taken the lessons we've learned from search to tackle even more challenges.
As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide our actions.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don't have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search. With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.
We know your time is valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we've broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it's a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We're pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we're hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

• We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it's possible that certain searches won't lead to any ads at all.
• We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
• Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There's always more information out there.
Once we'd indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens of countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google's search interface in more than 110 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don't speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture – and that doesn't just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees – energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed – and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn't good enough.
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can't reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
Even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious – but that's because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we're always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.


new services..

Personalized Homepage
We've added some new features to the way you can personalize your Google homepage. Now there's a section for bookmarks, as well as a way to add custom sections with the content you want from across the web. Note that you must be signed in to your Google Account to create and use your personalized homepage.
http://www.google.com/ig

Google Toolbar for Firefox
The Toolbar is kind of the "Swiss Army knife" for computing, making it easy to search and do other tasks directly from your browser. You can check spelling, autofill web forms, translate English words into other languages, and lots more. Now the Google Toolbar is available for the Firefox browser. (It's already out for Internet Explorer.)
http://toolbar.google.com

Google Maps Hybrid Mode
We've got Maps, we've got Earth, and now we've got a way to view satellite images with map data. It's the "Hybrid" mode. Very handy for seeing the lay of the land with, for example, street names on top. Look in the upper right hand corner of the map image to switch your view from Map to Satellite to Hybrid (and back again).
http://maps.google.com/

Google Groups Alerts
"Alerts" are a great way to inform you when keywords you have selected appear in news stories, web search results, and now, are mentioned within Google Groups topics. If you're tracking several subjects, this is far easier than reading through a (possible) boatload of messages. Just sign up to track Alerts of interest to you. There's a pull-down menu under "Type" where you choose among News, Web, or Groups notifications. And you can choose to receive Alerts daily, weekly, or as they happen.
http://www.google.com/alerts


uniqueness..

GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search Positions in Google:
Gaining search positions in Google (or Google SEO as the industry now calls it) is quite straightforward, it's all about using an ethical approach and providing unique information that is high quality but from a website that is compliant to Google’s guidelines.
Forget trying to trick Google, one thing that High Position can guarantee is that black hat or spamming may get you a short term gain but once you are compromised it will be the end of your Google aspirations. In the last few months Google has launched new high spec technology that enables it to read and understand many of the underhand techniques that were being used to manipulate the search positions.
Google SEO:
The preoccupation with manipulation of Google’s algorithm (Google SEO) has led most webmasters to overlook what is really needed by the search engine to rank your website highly. In order to gain a full grasp of this you need to understand what Google’s ultimate goal is. In a nutshell, Google wants to deliver relevant results to the search queries made through its interface, it knows that this relevancy has been the key to its popularity. Now that Google’s IPO has been completed the spotlight has turned back onto what gave it the success in the first place – relevant search results.
Understanding what this search engine wants to deliver and why it needs to deliver it, is why High Position is so successful at generating the returns for its clients. We are not trying to trick Google, we are just giving this search engine what it needs to deliver unique and credible information from well engineered and valid websites.
What does Google want from your website?:
There are many aspects that will help Google to evaluate your website in a positive manner. Many areas can be broken down into important subsections but the top tier criteria are as follows.
• Google wants your website to offer good quality information that is unique.
• Google wants your website to be popular with other quality websites.
• Google needs your architecture to be compliant.
• Google needs your website to pass validation.
• Google needs your website to be accessible.
• Google requires your website to have updated information.
What Google will frown upon:
• Any duplication of information within the site.
• Any duplication of information Internet wide.
• Bad architecture.
• Non compliancy.
• Non validation.
• Hostile code.
• Bad server setup.
What Google will ban you for:
• Javascript redirects.
• Hidden text or links using techniques such as no script tags.
• Deliberate manipulation through flash code or server-side cloaking.
• Improper use of domain names, even if it’s inadvertent.
• Bad neighbourhood linking.
• Improper use of frames.

Conclusion on Google Search Engine Optimisation:
These are just some of the areas that have either a positive or negative impact when Google comes to visit your server, it is worth remembering that there is no real formula that can be described as the term Google SEO but understanding and accepting what Google is trying to deliver through its search results will ensure that all the right boxes are ticked.
Agencies that are chasing page rank (PR) and inbound link counts can seriously undermine your profile in Google’s database, stealing content and having the wrong server set up can get you penalised as can duplication within your own website. Google now understands Javascript redirects and many other dynamic code black hat techniques; it can also easily identify bad link practice as well as hidden text and content.
High Position have a complete understanding of all these issues. We can work alongside web agencies and IT departments to ensure that any corporate website, no matter how complex, can be safely delivered to Google’s visiting spiders in the correct manner. Our pre-commencement site analysis will provide a complex insight into what Google thinks of any website, how it evaluates that site and what the website problems are in relation to Google.
The High Position solution will always remedy the issues; even if that takes time it is always worth it.
Remember the golden rule-there is no divine right to be in Google!








References:
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Google-It-ITs-Competitive-Advantage-234347/
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/whats_new_at_google.html
http://www.highposition.net/google-seo/

As we all know, Google is one of the famous search engines in the world. I guess everyone knows what google is right?! If you don't know then "GOOGLE IT"! .

Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31) the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour.

While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006, Google announced the purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Software

• Google's Competitive Advantages
  

> Free SEO Labor

Google's work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees in Mountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered a free labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world's number one search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google's rules, register their sitemaps and ping Google's services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google a huge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don't have the same level of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEO friendly tools and advise.

> Extra data - Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc

With its customized search service, Google Co-op, users don't only create vertical a search engine - they also give Google very valuable domain-specific information.

Also, by tagging images on Image Labeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google's Image Search.

>Google knows everything about your site

Today many sites use it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool is that it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if all sites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute
pageranks, as it would have the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites use Google Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.

The recently acquired FeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It's not only a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring site popularity.

> Google knows a lot about you - Personalization

Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about your personality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with more personalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searches for programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE's latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail, visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox -- well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological, but programming related :-)

>Google offers UNIVERSAL search

Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It also crawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map's Street View lets you drive around big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Google search.

> Google has psychological dominance

The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it is indispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other search engines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated - e.g your purpose is more about researching than finding - then you always want to try your search on Google as well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.

> Google is everywhere

OK, let's say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, such as:

ü If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google top of mind;

ü If you go to CNN.com, you have Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a new URL for search?

ü If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider, home page and feed subscriber.

I could go on, but the point is - there's no escape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also the success of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.


> Google has looooooots of ca$h

As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots of cash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high. In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any innovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.

• Google’s new services
  

· New Storage Service

Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB. (14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)

· Google Nexus One

Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone. (January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)

· Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.” (Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)

· Google Goggles

A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on
that image. (December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)

· Free DNS Service

Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security. (December 5th 2009 by serverguy

• What makes them so unique?
  

Getting a website to attain a high ranking position in Google search engine means great success. The higher the Google ranking the more traffic it gives to the site thus making more money from advertisers.

Reaching a high rank is not easy and it requires time and effort. In addition to that, one needs to read the latest news and trends on Internet marketing especially new Google SEO techniques. Among the top three search engines, Google has a very unique algorithm meaning it can have its own SEO techniques. Because of this, one might actually conclude that it is an on-going Google SEO work. Everyday Google SEO trends change so it requires continuous research to keep up with it.

There are lots of factors to consider than just being a user friendly site. High PR rank links, good content and age of the site can definitely take you up there.

Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important factors to consider when doing Google SEO. Google's system has a way to determine if the link is more valuable than the others. How does one determine the value of the link? Take into consideration the link's age, location, anchor text, relevancy and page rank.

Another factor to consider is the age of a domain. The older the domain name is, the higher its value. Google gives importance to this because they consider an old site a legal and reputable one thus giving it a higher ranking.

Good content is definitely the best way to get your site to a high rank especially if one uses top ranking keywords. Aside from that, the content needs to be informative and relevant to visitors of the website. It should be well written and interesting so that it can generate a great amount of traffic.

Aside from these factors and as part of one's Google SEO efforts, one must view their site from the standpoint of their audience. It should be user friendly and can capture right away the visitor's attention. It pays to invest on a good designer and programmer to complement the Google SEO techniques. Remember that Google SEO techniques are unique thus it has a set of guidelines different from the rest. Remember these and the Google SEO plan will definitely pay off.





REFERENCES:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/competing_with_google_search.php
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ashow/129.html
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google



VISIT MY BLOG http://fujiwarayumi.blogspot.com/

ABOUT GOOGLE
Google as one of the leading websites in the world, provides internet services that let you create blogs, send email, and publish web pages. Google has social networking tools, organization tools, and chat tools, services for mobile devices, and even Google branded merchandise. Google is not just all about Web Search, but still, it cannot be denied that Google had become so popular because of this.

Most of the services that Google offers are free, meaning we, users, don’t have to pay money just to avail it. On how Google make money without getting from the web surfers, is by their real customers – the advertisers. But still, Google just don’t gain profit through advertisers, the company also offers subscription services such as Google Earth Plus, and Google Earth Pro. Also, Google sells enterprise searching tools, servers, and search technologies for corporations.

Google has a reputation for a casual atmosphere. As one of the few successful dot.com startups, Google still retains many perks of that era, including free lunch and laundry for employees and parking lot roller hockey games. And actually Google employees are allowed to spend twenty percent of their time on projects of their choosing.

GOOGLE’s COMPETITORS
1. Yahoo!
2. MSN
3. AOL,
4. Disney Online Movie
5. Match.com
6. Sina Corp.
7. Etc.

GOOGLE’s COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
1. Free SEO labor
SEOs all over the world can be considered ass one of Google’s employee, they are not just limited to their visible employees, as long as it is a free labor force, it is fine. Since SEOs offers friendly tools and advises, it makes Google more well-liked.

2. Google knows everything about your site
Google Analytics, as a way of understanding their site traffics that gives Google an access to every important data in your site. Google no longer have to compute pageranks, as Google Analytics have the most accurate access to site popularity.

3. Google offers UNIVERSAL search
As Google have its Google Earth, it crawls to the real world. Also, Google Map’s Street lets you drive along with big sites in your browser.

4. Google has lots of cash
As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. Their profit margins are very high and they have lots of cash reserves. Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any innovation developed outwardly.


GOOGLE offers the following services
-Google Alerts
-Google Answers
-Google Blog Search
-Google Catalogs
-Google calendar
-Google Directory
-Froogle
-Google Maps
-Google Mobile
-Google News
-Google Scholar
-Google University
-Google Web Search


GOOGLE TOOLS
-Google Blogger
-Google Code
-Google Chrome
-Google Desktop
-Gmail
-Google Earth
-Google SMS
-Google Toolbar
-Google Talk

Getting a website to attain a high ranking position in Google search engine means great success. The higher the Google ranking the more traffic it gives to the site thus making more money from advertisers. Reaching a high rank is not easy and it requires time and effort. In addition to that, one needs to read the latest news and trends on Internet marketing especially new Google SEO techniques. Among the top three search engines, Google has a very unique algorithm meaning it can have its own SEO techniques. Because of this, one might actually conclude that it is an on-going Google SEO work. Everyday Google SEO trends change so it requires continuous research to keep up with it. Good content is definitely the best way to get your site to a high rank especially if one uses top ranking keywords. Aside from that, the content needs to be informative and relevant to visitors of the website. It should be well written and interesting so that it can generate a great amount of traffic. It cannot be deprived of that Google is user friendly and can capture right away the visitor’s attention. It pays a lot to know how users seem to manipulate easily the site without any hassles, that makes Google more appreciated and loved.


REFERENCES:
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ashow/129.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/competing_with_google_search.php

What is Google?

Via John Battelle, Rick Skrentas remarkable piece on what Google have actually built. They don’t just have the world’s best search engine; they have the world’s largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, and probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively runs 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Who are Google’s Competitors?

These are some of Google’s adversary:

Yahoo! Inc.
MSN
AOL,
Disney Online
Match.com, LLC
Sina Corp.
Daum Communications Corp.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AT GOOGLE

The focus of information technology at Google for both software and hardware is speed and cost. These two metrics are valued more than any other criteria such as reliability of machines or high performance enterprise computing hardware. Ultimately, the result must transform a response time of user query using Google’s search engine to be completed within a one second time-frame. Started in Larry Page’s dormitory room, the information technology at Google has transformed into a full-blown large cluster PC network that functions similar to a computing grid. Even though information technology infrastructure has changed dramatically over the years, the model of IT use at Google has stayed the same. This model follows the original principles adopted by the co-founders of building a prototype system that uses commodity hardware and intelligent software. The shift of computer industry with PCs becoming commodity electronic hardware over the years has worked in favor of Google’s IT strategy in getting the best cost performance ratio (Patterson & Hennessy, 2004). Thus, instead of purchasing the latest microprocessors, Google IT performs calculations to look for the best value of processing power per dollar and purchasing many PCs that are only a few months old in the market, but at a much lower discounted price. This is suitable for Google because the framework of their search engine is built around parallelizing many user query requests across multiple machines and if more processing is required, the system can simply increase more machines to serve even greater user requests. The overall price per performance is more important than individual peak performances, and this enables Google to achieve superior speed at a fraction of the cost rather than using a few, but expensive high-end server systems. The end equation for Google’s IT in selecting machines is calculated by the cost per query, and is derived by the sum of capital expenses and operating costs divided by performance. For accuracy, the calculation takes into inherent effects due to hardware depreciation and maintenance repairs. At the data centers, the primary cost factor is capital expenditure credited to hardware, followed by personnel and hosting costs (Barozzo, et al., 2003).

What are the services that Google offer?

Key Product and Services

Online advertising is Google’s core product and accounts for 90% of the company’s revenue. AdWords, a cost-per-click pricing scheme, was a result of Google’s newly formed business Model in online advertising. AdWords allows advertisers to pay Google once visitors click on an Advertisement after entering a search query. Unlike other online marketing that use image and animated banners, these advertisements are text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design. This is a concept that Google’s co-founders believe is essential for an enjoyable user search engine experience since most users typically want to find information and promptly leave the search results page. Increasing the covered audience is a complementary product called AdSense which involves placing targeted AdWords advertisements on Google’s partner websites

Product/Service Name Description

Google Earth - Satellite imagery of geographical locations
Google Maps - View driving maps and directions
Google Local - Search for local businesses and shops
Google News - Search for news stories
Google Video - Search for TV programs and video clips
Google Desktop Search - Search for offline information stored on computers
Google Image Search - Search for images online
Google Sketch Up - 3D model design tool
Google Checkout - Online payment processing service
Google Search Appliance - Enterprise search engine
GMail - Web-based email client
GTalk - Internet instant messaging and VoIP
Orkut - Online social network community
Froogle - Electronic shopper product search

Others:
Google Page Creator, Google Analytics, Picasa, Blogger, Google Mobile, Google
SMS, Google Finance, Google Groups, Google Scholar, Google Pack, Google Book
Search, Google Code, Google Alerts, Google Calendar

What is Google’s unique advantage?

One thing that has become evident to me is that Google grows in an organic fashion, unlike any other company I know of. Google develops tools that are internally useful and then releases them to the world. Google does not develop products to sell to the world. Google does not have external contracts, at least in the traditional sense, as far as I can tell.

Let me elaborate on this. Google is obviously best known for search and for ads associated with search. This is in essence Google’s one true product. It is the one feature Google developed for the outside world. When Google developed search it was no different from a small company. It is what Google has done since then that makes Google different.

Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads comes in. It’s beautiful.

It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.

At this point, you might be screaming at me that I’m wrong, because Google does have external contracts, especially for serving up ads on other sites. But notice that Google’s contracts are different from most companies’ contracts. Google isn’t developing a product for these companies. All they are doing is giving them an existing product that Google has already completed and released. Development on that product might still be happening, but it happens within Google, not within the realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.

For almost everyone else, you’re going to have to create a product and then drive sales of that product or else sign a contract and then deliver a custom product to the customer. You’ll have external dependencies that will force an outside reality upon you that Google simply doesn’t have. You can argue that Google is dependent upon ads, but at this point Google has captured such a large share of that market and is steadily capturing more of it, that it really isn’t a dependency for Google. Sure, Google should probably diversify; just in case the ad market tanks, but at this point Google has so much money they can afford to take their time.

Global Expansion
The international markets are critical for many technology companies in expanding new business opportunities and generating more revenues. Similarly, this principle is reminiscent in Google’s case, as the international markets contribute from 30% to 40% of the company’s total revenues every quarter for the past two years.4 In order to tap into the international market, Google’s search engine has been translated to allow multi-language search capabilities, while maintaining its philosophy of objective and unbiased search results (Brin, 2001). The strong international markets for Google include the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia. Google has transformed from a start-up firm to a multi-national corporation; however, the majority of its employees are still based in the Mountain View headquarters. Google has international presence in all continents of the world other than Africa and Antarctica. However, the location of its international employee base is divided into two primary groups: engineering and product development team, and a sales force team. Google offers customer interfaces in over 40 different languages and close to 50 different currency exchanges to date.

Conclusion

In only a short period of time, Google has become a dominant player in search technology and a formidable threat to many other technology firms in various industry sectors including advertising, standard software, web application development, and telecommunication networks. Behind the scenes, the use of information technology has been strategic and critical for Google’s search engine success and other Google products and services. A variety of advanced concepts in computer science have been applied to many of Google’s products and services ranging from topics in distributed systems, machine learning, software architecture, and communications networks. Google’s vision of applying advanced computing concepts and innovative ideas has allowed the company to stay as a forefront leader. However, there are even greater challenges for Google as it matures into a multi-national corporation. How will Google be able to enter international markets where information dissemination is highly regulated and controlled by the foreign governments? Can Google continue to sustain its rapid growth while continue to hold on its unique work culture? With the massive amount of information collected on a daily basis, will Google invade privacy concerns? Will Google be able to maintain its technology leadership as competition gets even more intense? And how real is the threat from Microsoft as it claims to defend itself and compete rigorously with Google in the search market? The story behind Google is only a start. Only time will tell Google’s destiny. Many futurists predict that Google may perhaps become the most important technology company this decade, similar to how Microsoft and Intel have changed the technology industry in the past.

References:
Google.com

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Subject: Assignment 7 (Due: January 30, 2010, before 01:00pm)

Google

Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including its more popular products: Gmail, Maps and You tube. Most of its Web-based products are free because Google makes its money from highly integrated online advertising through its AdWords and AdSense platforms. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information.

Google’s Competitors...

Google face competition in every aspect of our rapidly evolving business, particularly from other companies that seek to connect people with online information and provide them with relevant advertising. Currently they consider their primary competitors to be Microsoft and Yahoo.

Why the Google Business Model is a winning Business Model?

These are the key reasons why the Google Business Model won:

1.- Google had - and still has - a simple, clean, clear, minimalistic user interface. no frills, just the logo and the search box - easy and fast to load. And this was a key feature with the slow internet connections of the early years 1999 -2001 - while Yahoo and most of the other search engines were more like generalistic portals, full of confusion, full of useless features and useless links, full of annoying banner ads, heavy and slow to load.

Google had a clear understanding on psychology of perception, and how the interaction eye/brain works, while the bigger competitors didn't.

Bottom line is: If the user visits a search engine, what he wants to get is simply that: just a search engine.

A search engine which is fast and reliable. If the user wants a generalistic portal, he goes to a portal, not to a search engine.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Executives, understood this, and this was what they delivered. And made their users happy.

2.- Google had - and has - reliable search results (not always, but most of the time). Page and Brin's PageRank algorithm worked well.

3.- Google got good advice from VC's and from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been advised and assisted from the beginning by John Doerr, VC Partner of Kleiner Perkins and by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the leading law firm of Silicon Valley

Insight on Google Business Model

4.- Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model - Adwords - and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc.

5.- In the following years, Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products - Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Gmail. And slim revenues.

6.- Google worked very hard on Brand Building. It seems that brand building was much more important to them than just revenues and profits. The strategy worked. And it was a key asset in the subsequent IPO at the Nasdaq.

7 - Google was an innovator of the Business Model. Google delivered all these great new products basically for free, enticing and luring million of users worldwide, with the result of building the Brand in an outstanding, quite unbelievable way - and did it so fast.

At the IPO in August 2004 Google share price was set at $85, which to many financial analysts seemed excessive and unreasonable. In nov. 2007 Google shares had topped $700.
And in nov. 2007 Google stock market capitalization reached $230 billion, while annual revenues reached $16 billion and profits $4 billion.

An excellent return for Google shareholders.

Google's unique advantage

One thing that has become evident to me is that Google grows in an organic fashion, unlike any other company I know of. Google develops tools that are internally useful and then releases them to the world. Google does not develop products to sell to the world. Google does not have external contracts, at least in the traditional sense, as far as I can tell.
Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads come in.
It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.
At this point, you might be screaming at me that I’m wrong, because Google does have external contracts, especially for serving up ads on other sites. But notice that Google’s contracts are different from most companies’ contracts. Google isn’t developing a product for these companies. All they are doing is giving them an existing product that Google has already completed and released. Development on that product might still be happening, but it happens within Google, not within the realms of the contract. Google is still free to develop how ever they want.
For almost everyone else, you’re going to have to create a product and then drive sales of that product or else sign a contract and then deliver a custom product to the customer. You’ll have external dependencies that will force an outside reality upon you that Google simply doesn’t have. You can argue that Google is dependent upon ads, but at this point Google has captured such a large share of that market and is steadily capturing more of it, that it really isn’t a dependency for Google. Sure, Google should probably diversify, just in case the ad market tanks, but at this point Google has so much money they can afford to take their time.


Google’s Products and Services

Google’s product development philosophy is centered on rapid and continuous innovation, with frequent releases of early stage products that we seek to improve with every iteration. We often make products available early in their development stages by posting them on Google Labs, at test locations online or directly on Google.com. If our users find a product useful, we promote it to "beta" status for additional testing. Once we're satisfied that a product is of high quality and utility, we remove the beta label and make it a core Google product.

Here are some examples of our products and services:

• Google Web Search
• Google Desktop
• Google AdWords
• Gmail
• Google AdSense
• Google Earth
• Google News
• Google Finance
• Google Maps
• Google Enterprise

References:

http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/companyprofiles/a/google.htm
http://www.davechaffey.com/E-commerce-Internet-marketing-case-studies/Google-case-study/
http://www.vertygoteam.com/google_marketing_strategy.php
http://internetbusinessmodels.org/googlebusinessmodel

what is google?

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. The company was officially launched in September, 1998 in a friend’s garage. In one of the most anticipated Initial Public Offerings (IPO) Google raised $1.67 billion in August of 2004. Today, Google has over 12,000 employees in offices throughout the world.

Google’s mission statement and corporate culture reflect a philosophy that you can “make money without doing evil” and that “work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun”. These beliefs dominate life at Google. The official mission statement of the company is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”



The key question is:
why the Google Business Model is a winning Business Model?

The answer is a complex one, and involves more factors. It's a mix of smart decisions, excellent marketing strategy, great advisors, highly innovative and risky business model, and great products.

These are the key resons why the Google Business Model won:

1.- Google had - and still has - a simple, clean, clear, minimalistic user interface. no frills, just the logo and the search box - easy and fast to load. And this was a key feature with the slow internet connections of the early years 1999 -2001 - while Yahoo and most of the other search engines were more like generalistic portals, full of confusion, full of useless features and useless links, full of annoying banner ads, heavy and slow to load.

Google had a clear understanding on psychology of perception, and how the interaction eye/brain works, while the bigger competitors didn't.

Bottom line is: If the user visits a search engine, what he wants to get is simply that: just a search engine.

A search engine which is fast and reliable. If the user wants a generalistic portal, he goes to a portal, not to a search engine.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Executives, understood this, and this was what they delivered. And made their users happy.

2.- Google had - and has - reliable search results (not always, but most of the time). Page and Brin's PageRank algorithm worked well.

3.- Google got good advice from VC's and from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been advised and assisted from the beginning by John Doerr, VC Partner of Kleiner Perkins and by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the leading law firm of Silicon Valley


Insight on Google Business Model

4.- Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model - Adwords - and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc.

5.- In the following years, Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products - Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Gmail. And slim revenues.

6.- Google worked very hard on Brand Building. It seems that brand building was much more important to them than just revenues and profits. The strategy worked. And it was a key asset in the subsequent IPO at the Nasdaq.

7 - Google was an innovator of the Business Model. Google delivered all these great new products basically for free, enticing and luring million of users worldwide, with the result of building the Brand in an outstanding, quite unbelievable way - and did it so fast.

Eric Schmidt was made CEO of the company, David Drummond, an attorney of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who had advised Google founders since the early days, joined Google as Chief Legal Officer, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati took care of the IPO at Nasdaq.

At the IPO in August 2004 Google share price was set at $85, which to many financial analysts seemed eccessive and unreasonable. In nov. 2007 Google shares had topped $700.
And in nov. 2007 Google stock market capitalization reached $230 billion, while annual revenues reached $16 billion and profits $4 billion.

An excellent return for Google shareholders.







reference:
http://www.vertygoteam.com/google_marketing_strategy.php
http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/companyprofiles/a/google.htm

Google’s Business Model

• Yahoo
  

• Microsoft
  

How have they used information technology to their advantage?


How competitive are they in the market?


What new services do they offer?

Desktop products
Standalone applications
• AdWords Editor (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3 /XP/Vista)
Desktop application to manage a Google AdWords account. The application allows users to make changes to their account and advertising campaigns before synchronising with the online service.
• Gmail/Google Notifier (Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP)
Alerts the user of new messages in their Gmail account.
• Photos Screensaver
Slideshow screensaver as part of Google Pack, which displays images sourced from a hard disk, or through RSS and Atom Web feeds.
• Picasa (Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 2000/XP/Vista)
• Picasa Web Albums Uploader (Mac OS X)
An application to help uploading images to the "Picasa Web Albums" service. It consists of both an iPhoto plug-in and a stand-alone application.
Desktop extensions
These products created by Google are extensions to software created by other organizations.
• Blogger Web Comments (Firefox only)
Displays related comments from other Blogger users.
• Dashboard Widgets for Mac (Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets)
Collection of mini-applications including Gmail, Blogger and Search History.
• Send to Mobile (Firefox) (Discontinued)
Allows users to send text messages to their mobile phone (US only) about web content.

Mobile products
Online mobile products
These products can be accessed through a browser on a mobile device or a standard desktop web browser such as Firefox.
• Blogger Mobile
Only available on some US networks. Allows you to post to your Blogger blog from a mobile device.
• Calendar
Read a list of all Google Calendar events from a mobile device. There is also the option to quickly add events to your personal calendar.
• Gmail
Access a Gmail account from a mobile device using a standard mobile web browser. Alternatively, Google provides a specific mobile application to access and download Gmail messages quicker.
• News
Access Google News on a mobile device using a simpler interface compared to the full online application.
• Google Mobilizer
Makes any web page mobile-friendly.
• iGoogle
Simple version of iGoogle - you must visit the information page to choose which modules to display on your personal mobile version as not all modules are compatible.
Downloadable mobile products
Some of these products must be downloaded and run from a mobile device.
• Gmail
A downloadable application that has many advantages over accessing Gmail through a web [interface] on a mobile such as the ability to interact with Gmail features including labels and archiving. Requires a properly configured Java Virtual Machine, which is not available by default on some platforms (such as Palm's Treo).
• Maps (Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian,Palm OS, and J2ME)
A mobile application for viewing maps on a mobile device. The application lets you find addresses and plot directions. Teamed with a GPS the application can use your geolocation and show your current location on the map. The device must have either a specific application to use Google maps or any phone with a properly configured Java Virtual Machine.

Web products
Account management
• Dashboard
Dashboard is an online tool that allows Google Account holders to view all their personal information Google is storing on their servers.
Advertising
• Ad Planner
An online tool that allows users to view traffic estimates for popular web sites and create media plans.
• Ad Manager
A hosted ad management solution
• AdSense
Advertisement program for Website owners. Adverts generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis, and adverts shown are from AdWords users, depending on which adverts are relevant.
• AdWords
Google's flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.
Communication and publishing
• 3D Warehouse
Google 3D Warehouse is an online service that hosts 3D models of existing objects, locations (including buildings) and vehicles created in Google SketchUp by the aforementioned application's users. The models can be downloaded into Google SketchUp by other users or Google Earth.
• Apps
Custom domain and service integration service for businesses, enterprise and education, featuring Gmail and other Google products.
• Blogger
Weblog publishing tool. Users can create a custom, hosted blogs with features such as photo publishing, comments, group blogs, blogger profiles and mobile-based posting with little technical knowledge.
• Calendar
Free online calendar. It includes a unique "quick add" function which allows users to insert events using natural language input. Other features include Gmail integration and calendar sharing. It is similar to those offered by Yahoo! and MSN.
Mapping
• City Tours
An overlay to Maps that shows interesting tours within a city
• Maps
Mapping service that indexes streets and displays satellite and street-level imagery, providing driving directions and local business search.
• Map Maker
Edit the map in more than a hundred countries and watch your edits go into Google Maps. Become a citizen cartographer and help map your world.

What makes them so unique?

• Better and quicker search results
• Advanced search features, including searching for PDF, .doc and .ppt files, and displaying them as HTML
• Easy and powerful search administration
• Easy integration into web sites
• google is free to use, has a custom search engine, puts the search results according to the most popular to least popular.
• google has options for image search, article search or even search for any government document.
• It searches according to the terms you type and also searches for other terms with same meaning.
• It is fast, realiable, it has its own dictionary, calculater, and spell check.

How competitive are they in the international market?


Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_produ
https://adwords.google.com/select/
https://www.google.com/adsense/
www.google.com enterprise/gsa/index
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~paturi/cse91/Presents/mbotella.pdf


mY bLog:http://stihlyn.blogspot.com/

my blog:http:http://jevaldez.blogspot.com/

Google is one of the five most popular websites in the world. Google is a web search engine that lets you find other sites on the web based on keyword searches.

1.) Who are their competitors?

a.)Yahoo
b.)MSN
c.)SINA Corp.
d.)AOL Inc.
e.)Wikipedia

2.) How have they used information technology to their advantage?


3. How competitive are they in the market?


4. What new services do they offer?

Among the services analysed, the Google team includes
• MySpace
• YouTube
• ODEO
• Google Video
• Blogger
• Wetpaint
• eSnips.
WEB Product
Gmail

Mobility- A large part of social media content is produced using mobile devices. Emphasising mobility in connection with social media imposes special requirements on
the usability of applications. The input and output features of mobile devices are more
restricted compared to conventional PCs.
Google Web Search - Google's web search engine is well known for providing relevant search results with a clean interface. Google is the largest and most popular web search engine in the world.


5. What makes them so unique?



6.How competitive are they in the international market?



Source:

http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/tiedotteet/2007/T2384.pdf

http://investor.google.com/

http://bocowgill.com/GooglePredictionMarketPaper.pdf

http://resources.greatplacetowork.com/article/pdf/why_google_is_no._1.pdf





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All about GOOGLE INCORPORATION

Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet”.

Mission
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

HISTORY

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing). Goto.com was an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture's pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google's AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly roe in stature while generating revenue.

GOOGLE’S BUSINESS MODEL
Why the Google Business Model is a winning Business Model?

The business model of the GOOGLE is a winning model because it involves of more factors. It's a mix of smart decisions, excellent marketing strategy, great advisors, highly innovative and risky business model, and great products.
Below are the numerated reasons why the business model of the GOOGLE INC. is a winning one.
These are the key reasons why the Google Business Model won:


1. Google had - and still has - a simple, clean, clear, minimalistic user interface. No frills, just the logo and the search box - easy and fast to load. And this was a key feature with the slow internet connections of the early years 1999 -2001 - while Yahoo and most of the other search engines were more like generalist portals, full of confusion, full of useless features and useless links, full of annoying banner ads, heavy and slow to load.

Google had a clear understanding on psychology of perception, and how the interaction eye/brain works, while the bigger competitors didn't.

Bottom line is: If the user visits a search engine, what he wants to get is simply that: just a search engine.

A search engine which is fast and reliable.
If the user wants a generalistic portal, he goes to a portal, not to a search engine.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Executives, understood this, and this was what they delivered. And made their users happy.

2. Google had - and has - reliable search results (not always, but most of the time). Page and Brin's PageRank algorithm worked well.

3.- Google got good advice from VC's and from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been advised and assisted from the beginning by John Doerr, VC Partner of Kleiner Perkins and by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the leading law firm of Silicon Valley


Insight on Google Business Model

4.- Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model - Adwords - and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc.

5.- In the following years, Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products - Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Gmail. And slim revenues.

6.- Google worked very hard on Brand Building. It seems that brand building was much more important to them than just revenues and profits. The strategy worked. And it was a key asset in the subsequent IPO at the Nasdaq.

7 - Google was an innovator of the Business Model. Google delivered all these great new products basically for free, enticing and luring million of users worldwide, with the result of building the Brand in an outstanding, quite unbelievable way - and did it so fast.

G O O G L E

Google Inc is a global information technology leader, innovating how people connect with information. Google’s automated search technology has made its free search engine website the number one visited website on the Internet, as rated by ComScore and Alexa.com displacing Yahoo.

COMPETITORS
Although Google in its broadest perception has gained an unparallel marketplace acceptance, in the narrower search market its competitors are Yahoo! (YAHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT), which is currently expanding into the online search and advertising business. Yahoo, founded four years before Google, was historically the leading online search site, but in January 2009, Google made headlines by overtaking Yahoo in unique users per month.
In June, 2008, Yahoo and Google announced a plan that would allow Yahoo to place Google ads on its web site. This revenue sharing agreement could net Yahoo $800 million a year. The deal was initially seen as an attempt by Yahoo to fend off Microsoft. Google and Yahoo together control 80% of the search advertising market, and, as a result, the plan has been opposed by the U.S. Public Interest Group on grounds of antitrust. In light of this, Google backed out of the deal to avoid further antitrust law complications in early November 2008.
However, Google may soon face a new threat from a possible partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. Though Yahoo! rejected a buy-out offer from Microsoft in 2008, as of May 2009 the two are reportedly negotiating a partnership in search, positioning the companies to attack Google in its primary business.

Other Competitors are the following:
INTERNET CONTENT PROVIDERS
• AOL
• Inc.Disney OnlineMove,
• Inc.Match.com, LLC
• Sina Corp.
• Daum Communications Corp.
• Industry (Internet Information Providers)

New Services
Business Overview
Google’s search products allow its users to efficiently search through vast amounts of web-based information, organizing and delivering results based on relevance. It also has a long and growing list of products in many other areas of computer applications. Consumer usage of its products is free, financed through advertising (97% of Revenues) and licensing (3% of Revenues) sales.

Business Solutions
Google AdWords lets you promote your business alongside relevant Google search results and on our advertising network. Reach people looking for information about your products and services online. Easily control your budget and target prospects geographically.

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant ads on their online content and earn money. AdSense supports a wide variety of online media including websites, mobile, video, games and feeds.

Use Google Analytics easy-to-understand reports to make measurable improvements to campaigns and websites. Learn which keywords, sites and locations bring high-value traffic, and be more informed about how visitors are reacting to your site's content.

Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant ads on their online content and earn money. AdSense supports a wide variety of online media including websites, mobile, video, games and feeds.

Postini services
Secure your email. Protect your email infrastructure with hosted spam and virus protection, archiving, and encryption.

Google Ad Manager

Manage your ad inventor. New! Sell, schedule, deliver, and measure your directly-sold and network-based ad inventory.

Google It: IT`s Competitive Advantage
How have they used information technology to their advantage?
I have read one of the site in which the Google’s CIO Ben Fried share his thoughts on IT’s role in corporate culture as an competitive advantage.
He believes that IT plays a pivotal role in building a great culture and subsequently a great company and he puts it into practice in a number of ways. One part of that is making technology accessible and open. By giving users what they want instead of what the company believes is best.
Here is what he stated.
Fried: A lot of CIOs say their only job is to create competitive advantage for their company. I shade it a little differently. Creating competitive advantage is incredibly important, but I think you need to be aware that differentiation doesn’t necessarily have to limit itself to competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is one important way in which a company can differentiate itself.
But more and more, people need to understand the way IT becomes part of corporate culture. Part of establishing a great company is establishing a unique culture. It’s critical to find what defines your company and makes it different. It might not necessarily be making the product better or cheaper that creates competitive advantage. Technology has a unique opportunity to make your company different, and that’s what CIOs need to focus on.
One thing CIOs—and other executives, I’m sure—have a hard time with is that the things that got you into that seat have very little do with the things you need to do once you’re in it. You have to eliminate all sentimentality from yourself. It’s very easy to want to continue doing the things that got you to where you are, but you have to realize that you have to take a broader view of the company.
Technology Overview
We stand alone in our 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, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank technology that changed the way searches are conducted.
From the beginning, our 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, ours 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 we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.
The software behind our 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. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.
• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
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. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.
• Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our 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), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.
Our innovations don't stop at the desktop. To give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, we continue to develop new mobile applications and services that are more accessible and customizable. And we're partnering with industry-leading carriers and device manufacturers to deliver these innovative services globally. We're working with many of these industry leaders through the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, which will offer people a less expensive and better mobile experience.
GOOGLE’s Uniqueness
For me, what unique with the GOOGLE is their philosophy in which these are their core principles that guides their actions.
Below are the lists of the PHILOSOPHY of GOOGLE:
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
For them, they believe focused on providing the best user experience possible.
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
They fully put their whole dedication to improving search engine in which focused exclusively on solving search problems. Their hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
We know your time is valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. And their goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible.
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web.
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We're pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
• We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it's possible that certain searches won't lead to any ads at all.
• We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
• Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
7. There's always more information out there.
Once we'd indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to people seeking answers.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens of countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google's search interface in more than 110 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don't speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture – and that doesn't just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees – energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed – and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can't reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

REFERENCES:

google wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
http://www.google.com/services/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/kimuh72/google-facts-216737
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=GOOG
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Google-It-ITs-Competitive-Advantage-234347/
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Google_%28GOOG%29
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/business.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/facts.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html