What started in the late 90′s (1998 to be exact) is now a very large company that reaches probably the most amount of people worldwide. It started with their search algorithm and an interface to use the information they had stored and indexed. But now they have their own operating system (Android), a browser (Chrome) and a whole bunch of other products.
In this article I will give a short oversight of what they are doing and how all these products interconnect with each other. Also why some products are not creating money but are very important to sell their main product. While Google is really big and you can discuss if they aren’t too big they always claim to “Not do any evil”.
Search engine
The core of the company is their search engine that most of the people will know. Or better formulated; most people think Google is only a search engine. Google is a lot more than only a search engine but the search is the core part in my opinion.
Adwords
Maybe the most known kind of online advertising is Google adwords and it is found on a lot of Google products like Youtube and Gmail and also on a lot of other sites. An advertiser can create ads that are displayed on the user profile that is visiting the site. It is plausible that this is the cash cow of Google because they have a very accurate profile of users and can very effectively show ads.
Analytics
Google allows webmasters to install Google Analytics to track the visits to his site. This way Google collects very much information on the visitors and also the webmaster has some nice tools to monitor the visitors. The market share of Analytics is around 50% [1] [2]
Gmail, Google Docs
The total number of gmail users is about 150 million in 2009 and I suspect it has grown the last years with the introduction of Android and Chrome OS. Also universities has started using the office suit of Google because it is very cheap in comparison to Microsoft Exchange.
Youtube
What began in 2005 from a garage has been acquired by Google one year later and is now the greatest video site on the internet. The site generates roughly 2 billion views per day[3] and 1 day of video is uploaded every minute.
Android
What started really small a few years ago as a mobile operating system has now grown to one of the largest smart phone operating systems. Almost 50% of the smart phones is running Android according to Canalys
Chrome
The browser market has been dominated for year by Internet Explorer after losing the browser war in the nineties. FireFox started the next battle and won some ground in the years following. Google decided to build there own smooth and (very) fast browser. They launched their Chrome browser in december 2008 and in 2011 has a worldwide marketshare of 25%. According to statcounter Internet Explorer is slowly losing the new browser battle and Google Chrome is growing.
Chrome OS
Google is exploring a new Operating System paradigm that uses only a browser (Chrome) and a internet connection. All apps are running in the cloud and no local data is stored. As Chrome OS is still under development it is not used very much but it is an interesting paradigm shift back to the client-server architecture.
Google TV
Not very popular but look promising is Google TV. It works on Android and uses Chrome to render apps and web-content to a TV. This way it is possible to get all the content and functionality of Google and the Web to the living room.
And much, much more
As this is supposed to stay a blog post and not become a book I only picked the greatest products of Google and I forgot to mention a lot more. For a impression a short list of products I did not mention:
- Blogger
- Picasaweb
- Groups
- News
- Earth
- AppEngine
- Maps
- etc…
Why?
With Google Adwords they have a really interesting cash cow and they could not do all the other things without a steady stream of cash flowing towards them. In my opinion Google is build by very technical and enthusiastic people who love what the are doing. They build en invent really great products. But there is a underlying motive and that is they need to earn money to pay it all. One way of earning money is getting people online and clicking ads and providing user information in the form of statistics and other data that Google can use to server more ads.
If we read our mail we get an ad of Adwords, if we watch a video we get an ad of Adwords, if we read a blog we get one, if we watch photos, well you get the point. Google is really big and has a great impact in our lives.
Whether this can be called “evil” I do not know, that is a discussion of another magnitude. Facebook should also be considered in that context. But we should be aware of that motivation and act accordingly.
Disclaimer
The facts are probably not always correct but I don’t have the intention to be correct to the decimal, it is just an impression to show how massive Google affects our digital live.