The Google Series – Google Origins and Company Background
The Google Series: Google Origins and Company Background
How well your website performs in search engines and particularly Google, will likely determine whether your business is found, how much inbound enquiry you receive and ultimately your sales performance. It doesn’t matter whether your customers are other businesses or you sell direct to consumers, search engine performance is important. With over 97% market share in NZ, Google is the preferred search engine for users across the spectrum. Given this dominance it is important to understand a little about this global online phenomenon.
Few would deny that Google has transformed the online world, and for many, Google search has provided the pathway to their first online experiences. Emerging as a result of a university research project in the early 90’s, Google, which now trades as Alphabet Inc, has become one of the most valuable public companies in the world today. (If not the most valuable?)
The brain child of two PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they transformed search, starting when they invented the page rank system. PageRank as Wikipedia describes it, “is the algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.”
According to Google:
“PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites buy tadalafil online.” While this is not the only algorithm used by the company it is first and probably the best known.
Google Company Background
Born in 1996, the Google domain was registered in 1997, and the company incorporated in 1998. After nearly selling the business in 1999 to help with their academic pursuits, the founders were fortunate enough to secure $25 million of funding, and used these resources to go on and produce a search product that simply was better than anything else that was available.
By starting with the simple concept of aiming to continuously “deliver the best results possible” for any given search, they have not only become the most preferred search engine on the planet but have also become easily the most dominant. Later in this series we will explain a little more detail about how Google’s search works “which begins by crawling the web that is made up of 60 trillion individual pages (and growing), then sorting these pages by their content, and keeping track of them in an index. Then using algorithms, which are programs and formulas they have written, they pull the relevant documents from the index and rank them using 200 different factors to deliver the best results possible for your search query”.
Again from Google “behind your simple page of results is a complex system, carefully crafted and tested to support more than one hundred billion searches each month”.
Further on in this series of articles we will delve further into many elements of search, why it is important, and how it can work for you and your business.
Many think of Google as a “one trick pony”, i.e. while they have invested in multiple other activities, it is still search that is their only real true success story! Well if we think in terms of users and take up of other products and services they are involved in; that view couldn’t be further from the truth! According to Adweek – “The company’s six products—Google, YouTube, Android, Google Maps, Google Play and Google Chrome—now each have more than 1 billion users globally.”
With a record sales under its belt (revenue of US$18.7 billion) for the last quarter, it will be amazing to see how this global conglomerate will change the way we do business and live our lives, as we move beyond its 18 birthday!
Stuart Clark
strategus.co.nz
