Google founders larry page and sergey bin |
In 2001.they appealed to the geek chic and organized over 500 million usenet archives (The internet's largest bulletin board/discussion network) and made it entirley searchable and document followed seccesses by images and scanned searchale shoping catalogues.
By this time ,not only had they already surpassed every search enigma in breadth and depth,but also in the quality of search .All this was done in three or foure short years.
The 80 billion dollar (Google worth) question is how did they do it well ?And is it that no one was caught up? One reason may be their cheap data center architecture ,which was scaled virtually unchecked.These data clusters are the muscle behind Google and are amongst the most powerful computing clusters in the world,unparalleled in their ability to devour inconceivable volumes of data in the order of microseconds without a single hiccup.Add to mix their proprietary ,democratic search algorithm (page rank) immortalized the search business.
Google has historically taken a sword through conventional business and marketing hype.They are driven by an academic zeal and childlike curiosity.Their culture promotes employees to spend 20 percent of their time exploring personal projects and ideas.
In 2004 ,they opened up a development office just seven miles from the Microsoft headquarters(where about 40,000 of the world's top software developers reside) which accommodates about 200 Microsoft's key talent.
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In 2003 Google acquired one of the most popular blogging services;Blogger.
Once again ,their mission was to get into the information medium through blogs which are quite talkative.Around the same time Google punched an update version of the Google toolbar (released originally in 2000) that included an advanced feature that let users set an option to allow Google to see the URLs of every site they visit.
On April 1,2004,G-mail was announced boasting one gigabyte of storage along with Google's plans to open an office on the moon.This led most people to believe it was all an April fool's jokes ( The competition was still offering two to five megabytes of e-mail storage)The news was real and the world took notice.For Google ,it was only data,they archived ,scanned,and showed it which allowed the service to be provided free of cost.With G-mail also come the first wave of controversy,the concern is that if a court order is ever issued,Google will be obliged to turn over private use data to authorities and only then one begins to see a meinfiled of privacy issues. And then again ,what if Google servers are hacked?It boils down to trusting a corporation to retain some of your most personal documents in their care.
Two months prior ,in October 2004 Google acquired keyhole corporation digital satellite imaging company that would eventually spawn the technology behind Google maps and Google earth.Featuring remarkable ease of use ,and as of 2005,covering the whole planet ,Google Maps and Google Earth opened p the planet to useer in an unprecedented way.Of late, however ,an increasing number of defense personnel worldwide have raised concerns about Google making readily available sensitive security data such as detailed satellite imagesof military bases ,high profile landmarks ,and nuclear powers plants.They aruge that these images could provide potential terrorists with an easy tool to plan attacks.
Web Accelerator failed to get off the ground .Hotmail and Yahoo ! Mail retaliated to G-mail which is currently still in beta.Google Maps is challenged by MSN Earth .The IM markets are dominated by AOL,Yahoo and MSN, and there is a slim chance Google will be able to gain a sustainable advantage in these markets likes it did ,in search .They are gasping for a breath of fresh air.Search ad information organization are harder nuts to crack but the competition will catch up.Google realizes this and it remains to be seen if they hold a trump card.