Once upon a time Google
Google's philosophy combines what makes the success of Microsoft and Apple combined: Like Microsoft it takes on his own all the products that have success, but like Apple gives them an intuitive user interface. And it is characterized by free, products being financed by advertising.
At Mountain View, California, is the headquarters of the main Web company, the GooglePlex.
Google is not only a search engine, but also a multitude of services and mainly
the monetization of sites and blogs, but also technologies available to Webmasters.
Its objective is: "To organize the world's information and make it universally
accessible and useful". With that well defined philosophy: "The
work should be a challenge, and the challenge should be fun."
On August 10, 2015, Larry Page announced a restructuring of the firm. Google will be part of a group whose parent company is called Alphabet, headed by him and co-founder of Google. Sundar Pichai becomes the new CEO of Google after his role as product manager.
In 1988, 3600 windows were replaced in the future building of Google.
History
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google September 7, 1998 with more than a million
dollars of funds. They had previously registered the domain name on September
15, 1997. They were students at Stanford University and started the engine
as a research project in 1994. It was a program called BackRub who felt the
importance of sites by the number of links pointing on them. The first patent
on the PageRank was filed in September 2001.
The company would be called Googol, for a number of pages with 100 zeros,
but the domain name was already in use. According to another close source a team member typed Google instead of Googol to see if the domain was free, which was the case. This word has pleased Larry Page who decided to keep it.
The two students have offered to sell their technology between 1 and 1.6 million dollars to several search engines, Infoseek, Lycos, who saw no interest, and especially Excite, one of the major search engines at the time, with which there were many talks, but with no agreement on price, so they created their own site.
In early 1999, Page and Brin have had serious discussions with George Bell, the CEO who has rejected an offer to buy Google for $ 1 million. They then discussed with Vinod Khosla to Offer $ 750,000, also refused. Google is worth 170 billion in 2010.
Who remembers Excite?
The success of the search engine on competitors comes partly from the clean
home page, and partly from the PageRank algorithm, which was providing more
accurate results.
But the fortune of the company comes mainly from Adsense, its democratic advertising
system allowing any website to earn income thanks to its contents.
In 2001, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell for 4 years, takes the direction of Google and stay here for 10 years.
New management
On April 4, 2011 Larry Page, a cofounder of Google replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO. What has changed since then:
- Implementation of Panda, which penalizes 15% of sites in English in the world.
- Move to social networks with the release of Google+.
- Closed July 20 Google Labs, the testing center for new projects.
- The same day, the Google Directory based on Dmoz, is closed.
- Change in people. Women are excluded from management including Marissa Meyer, who headed the search engine (she is now CEO of Yahoo).
Steve Jobs had a mission, shortly before his death, to advise the leaders of other computer companies.
He advised Page to significantly reduce the number of products. Apple has little products, 5 products and its succeeds much.
The council was followed as that can be verified in the obituary of websites. Google has closed a number of sites and services.
Google products? Search, mail, mobile and netbook OS, social network, cartography, online apps (Docs), video, programming languages, file system, databases, news, mobile manufacturer, driverless car, augmented reality glasses, fiber.
Has Google changed with the new management? In a blog post intitled Why I left Google, a former employee explains Google is now a different company, focused mainly on revenues, without the desire to invent the future.
Google becomes a subsidiary
5 years later, Google changes its CEO again, and like Microsoft, put an Indian to his head, Sundar Pichai. Google becomes a member of a larger company, Alphabet, but Youtube, Maps, Android remains its products. All the staff of Google becomes that of Alphabet and shareholders of Google become those of Alphabet.
Among the products of Alphabet: Calico, X, Fiber, Nest and ... Google.
Google against the rest of the World
| Competitor | Result | |
|---|---|---|
| Altavista | Google Search | Success |
| Overture | Adsense | Success |
| Hotmail | Gmail | Success |
| Friendster | Orkut | Fail |
| Firefox/IE | Chrome | Success |
| iOS | Android | Success |
| Windows | Chrome OS | ? |
| Google+ | Fail | |
| Groupon | Offers | Fail |
| Wikipedia | Knol | Fail |
| Paypal | Checkout | Fail |
| Yelp | Places | Fail |
To each successful business on the web, Google is trying to oppose a similar service.
But there are also areas where it is Google the precursor: Maps, Earth. And where it is copied by Microsoft. Another success is Youtube, bought from another enterprise.
Google+ comes after Orkut and Buzz that failed.
For now, Paypal, Craiglist, Digg and Amazon are missing in the list of targets and the field of games where Microsoft is successful.
Litigations
Investigation for abuse of dominant position has been launched by the Federal Trade Commission in July 2011.
These are many complaints from businesses that feel aggrieved by the practices of search engine that are the source of the survey, which reached the U.S. after the equivalent in Europe.
The main complaint about Google is it does not apply the same rules to its services as competing services, so they arrive at the top of the results whatever they do.
And as the company diversifies more and more, the malcontents are becoming more numerous.
In the worst case this could havelead to the dismantling of the company, but it 2013, this was solved with a fine.
In Europa Foundem and two other firms backed by Microsoft complained to the European Commission to have been removed from Google's search results. These are price comparison sites and Google decided to penalize those sites that only redirect on other sites. Google answered in a post.
The Google/Alphabet galaxy
Web services
New services are developed by Google Labs, others come from buyout, and then once acquired, almost all become free.
- Search engine
-
Google is the most used search engine before Yahoo and Bing with
around 60% of Worldwide queries.
To commemorate various events, Google displays a special logo, a doodle on the search page... - Automated translation
- Unlike other programs that make a grammatical and semantics analysis of sentences, Google uses the texts in several languages in its index, and take infos on these translations to translate the proposed text.
- Messaging
- The Gmail online messaging service has an effective spam filtering and which can be augmented with other services, including research in emails.
- Advertisement
- The principle of this system of cost per click or views, based on keywords bids had been invented by Goto.com that then became Overture is used by Adsense and Admob for mobiles.
- Mapping and earth in 3D
- Google Earth show the planet in three dimensions, thanks to satellite supplied images. Earth contains a flight simulator and a driving simulator.
- Social network
- After Orkut and Buzz, Google tooks up the problem of the social network from a new angle, mimicking Facebook with improvements in Google+ and the result was very different. This alternative attempts to provide original services and is constantly growing.
- Hosting
- Google App Engine est a free hosting for Web application. It is intended to help startups to build easily a website that combines other Google services such as Maps. It is supplemented by Google Site and Google code for open source projects.
- Videos sharing
- With Youtube.
- Library
- Scan of all the books in the World.
- Museum
- Visit through Street View.
Software and frameworks
- Chrome
- Browser aimed at improving processing of web applications.
- Android
- It is an operating system and a user
interface for mobile phones.
A Java API is provided to enable the development of applications. - Chrome OS
- A system for web applications only.
- Go and Dart
- Programming language for system developers and web apps. For example Go, a minimalist C++ with coroutines and Dart, a modern C with classes and garbage collector.
Working at Google
The Fortune magazine named it No. 1 on the list of 100 companies where it
is good to work.
Google employs 40,000 people worldwide in 2013.
400 members of the staff are assigned to recruiting and read 3500 CV per day.
It will take between 10 and 20 hiring interviews before being hired. Here is the list of 140 questions to answer to become Google employee.
For a programmer, the salary would be $7000 per month.
Google employees are classified into four social classes which are distinguished by a badge of one color.
- White Badge: This is the upper class, it has all privileges including skiing holidays.
- Red badge: They have many privileges but less than white badges.
- Green badge: They are employees of lower classes.
- Yellow badge. Are responsible for menial tasks such as scanning books page by page to Google Book Search. They have no privilege and can not even use the bike's center.
See also: Google and programming, pro and cons. (Picture). This is a personal opinion by an ex-employee. Google corporate culture, by the same.
Google's datacenters
Anatomy of Google's search engine
The exact number of server is not notified, but we know that Google has established an infrastructure for 1 000 000 servers. Some estimate the number up to 2000000 on the basis of surface of its datacenters. The number of servers was 450 000 in 2006.
Google has in 2013 from external sources 36 datacenters of known localization, implemented primarily in the United States and Europe. In 2013 there are 19 major data centers in the USA. Google's site gives lower numbers, for example it offers 19 places to visit in the world..
With each new construction, the company strives to improve the environmental quality of the installation:
- Reduction of energy consumption. Use of renewable energy alternatives.
- Recovery of 100% of the water used for cooling.
- Recycling 68% of used equipment.
Google explains how it works to reduce energy consumption in its datacenters, as they are specially designed to use far less energy than typical centers.
" In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query "
More infos...
Statistics for Alphabet/Google
On second quarter 2017, Alphabet's incomes were US$ 26 billion. Like all the big web companies, including Apple and Facebook, Google only pays 2.4% tax on its profits, thanks to a very wise monetary circuit. It is headquartered in Ireland with a low taxation, but that's not enough, revenues are actually reported in the Cayman Islands. Some European states are heavily taxing the transfer of funds to these countries, which is not the case of the Netherlands, also Google's funds are they transferred from Ireland to the Netherlands (there is no tax between European states) and from the Netherlands to the Cayman Islands.
- Financial statistics for Alphabet. And other information on the company.
Google released on May 2014 stats about diversity in the enterprise: 70 % of employees are male, 61 % are white, 30 % Asian, 3 % Hispanic, 2 % Black. In the tech sector, Men are 83 %.
Search engines market shares in the World in 2017 (according to netmarketshare)
Google: 80.6% Bing: 7.51% Baidu: 6.16% Yahoo: 4.51%
Second part: Facts and myths about Google.