Google

toc =Introduction= Google is one of most widely used search engines on the Internet. A user types in a word or a string of words and in a matter of seconds, the search for the awaited information is completed. The word Google actually originated from the misspelling of the word googol, coined by Milton Sirotta, which stands for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googol is actually symbolic in terms of Google’s mission which is to help organize the vast amount of information which is contained on the Internet.

=Founders=



Two Stanford University graduates, [|Larry Page] and [|Sergey Brin], started a project together to build a successful system where large amounts of data can be organized in such a manner that retrieval of that data would be made simple. Their creation of BackRub, their first search engine, quickly gained popularity.

=History=

Page and Brin continued with their quest to develop a profitable technology, and finally were told by a friend, Yahoo! founder Davil Filo, that they need to build a business before they could find financial support. With slow but steady interest from others, the two men raised enough funds to start Google Inc in September 1998. With up to 10,000 searches a day, the mention of Google was given in many magazines, giving them a spot in the Top 100 Web Sites of 1998. With growing attention from the corporate world, many investors started to show interest. In 1999, the “beta” label came off the Google website, and approximately 3 millions searches per day were occurring. By 2000, Google won a Webby Award and People’s voice award for its technical achievement. With its informal corporate environment, expanding technology, greater profits and more interest, Google quickly became one of the most widely used websites on the Internet, reaching up to 100 million searches a day with an index of a billion pages. 2001 and 2002 brought with it international interest and innovation. Offices were now being set up internationally, and language-specific searches were now an option. With an index of over 3 million webpages, Google started thinking of new and innovative ways to keep the company a favourite among consumer and business users alike. Such additions as Google news, image search, Google Toolbar, and many more lead to winning 2001 Search Engine Watch Award. With many creations and innovations along the way, Google Inc never seems to rest. In more current times, 2005 brought upon Google Earth, a way to search the world for specific geographical destinations, and zooming into real images of that area. Google also expanded its company with Googe Talk, Google Desktop, Google Blog Search and many more additions to provide their users with limitless possibilities to searching and using the Internet.


 * Screenshot of Google Earth**


 * Screenshot of Google Toolbar**

=Technology=

Many search engines base their technology on running a search on the Internet for the most visited websites, which would be organized and displayed to a search engine user as a comprehensive list of most favourite sites to the least. Google’s technology actually uses Google bots, “spider-like” web crawlers that find webpages and sends that information to an indexer. This indexer “reads” the pages and sorts all the words on another database. When doing a search, a query processor compares the search words with those in the word database and brings up the most relevant pages. This relevance ranking is conducted by a program called PageRank. The process of doing a search on Google doesn’t even take a second.

=Media Convergence=

Online business and media companies are always looking for ways to improve their businesses and attract more customers into their online domains. That is done through the enhancement of current products and services offered, as well as the introduction of new technologies that would prove to be successful and in demand by the typical internet user. This is where Google and BSkyB come together. The leading internet search engine has merged its services with those of BskyB to release a 'user-generated video service that will run off Google's video content tools'. In addition, BSkyB will offer its existing customers the chance to sign up for a customized version of Google's Gmail.

This action has been viewed as a positive move by the customer base behind these two giant media firms. Many of today's broadcasting and media companies are effected because their content is being leaked to many people around the world through video streaming links. Taking European Football for example, teams are paid by the millions of dollars for media companies to broadcast their games live to their customers. Due to video streaming, these media companies are losing customers to the illegal approach of watching games. The public's excuse is the fact that in their areas in the world, there are no media companies broadcasting the game, so they resort to video streaming. With the introduction of a legalized form of video streaming through Google and BSkyB, the process of watching football games live will be more convenient and the quality of the games will be much better, and thus benefiting the customers with access to any game they want as well as the media companies who have diversified their sources of income and provided an innovative in demand technology.

=Other=

Google has attempted to directly compete with Microsoft by introducing an Excel- type program for its users.Much of Google's revenue can be attributed to "Adwords," where advertisers are charged a specific amount of money per user click. Their ad appears on the screen where a user is performing the search. [|Adwords] allows companies to reach their target market in an efficient way.Google and Youtube are now attaining much of the attention from the users. It has taken most of the attention, and most of the students rely on google as their main source of research. Its network has expanded worldwide.

=References=

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Brin, Sergey and Page, Larry. “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” __Stanford__ __University__. 20 Nov. 2006 <[|http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html]>

"BSkyB Broadband to Partner Google." __BBC NEWS__. 6 Dec. 2006. 06 Dec. 2006 <[|http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6214220.stm>.]

=Picture References=

Google Logo: http://fgiasson.com/blog/media/google%20logo.jpg Google Founders: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/nvgrfx/3892GoogleFounders.jpg Google Earth: http://www.audleytravel.com/media/features/google_earth/screenshot1_popup360.jpg Google Toolbar: http://img.clubic.com/photo/00FA000000221575.jpg

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