Google: The Company, Business Tool, and Search Engine

Written By:

Google, Inc.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have created a multinational business that not only has become a verb in our everyday online and information-seeking lives, but as well a company that has the largest share of the search engine market, has been ranked in the top 5 companies to work for by Fortune every year since 2007, and is synonymous with innovation, inspired engineering, and experimentation. Google is respected by its peers for its foresight and lofty goal: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

See below for a list of books held by the Business Library, many of which celebrate the history, products, and company culture of Google.

For more company information on GOOG (NASDAQ) such as financials and stock information, competitors, products, suppliers, recent legal cases, intellectual property, and more, consult:

Lexis/Nexis Academic - Company Dossier

Thomson One Banker - Research Report Search

Mergent Horizon - Companies

Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage - Companies

Ten Challenges Facing Google's New CEO Larry Page:

Deal with the growth of social networking giant Facebook
Circumvent the obstacles that China is throwing in its path
Stay out of the cross hairs of antitrust regulators around the world
Catch up with Apple on mobile innovation
Make Google a good investment in the stock market
Get people to trust it when it comes to privacy
Hang on to its people in a talent war that is heating up
Learn how to deal with the news media
Fix Google’s public image problems
Find a huge new business beyond search

VentureBeat.com

Google & Anti-Trust:

Following FTC investigation of Google business practices, a survey conducted by FairSearch.org in September 2011 found that American adults are uncomfortable with Google's market dominance.

Eight in ten (79%) Americans favor the FTC’s investigation of the company for restricting fair competition and misleading consumers. Half (49%) say they strongly favor the FTC’s actions.

Over six in ten (63%) say it is unfair for Google to use the profits it makes from its dominant position in search advertising to buy smaller, innovative companies at an early stage, preventing them from becoming competitors.

Over eight in ten (84%) say it is unfair for Google to take content from other websites and present it as its own, depriving these other websites of potential consumer traffic.

Three-quarters (74%) say it is unfair for Google to raise prices for advertising without notice and to favor large e-commerce companies over small local businesses.

Almost six in ten (57%) feel that Google’s control of 79% of the search advertising market is bad for consumers. Only a third (33%) consider this a good thing for consumers.

FairSearch.org

Marketing Your Business With Google

"Does anything (or anyone) matter if it (or she) does not show up on the first page of a Google search?”

Vaidhyanathan, page 7

If Google is the primary means through which users search the Internet, then the goal for any business owner looking to grow their enterprise through a web presence should be to secure a place in the top Google results for their keywords of choice.

PageRank & TrustRank

The PageRank algorithm used by Google to sort results is a highly proprietary component of Search Engine Optimization. At its core, PageRank assesses the number of links pointing to a given site, in relation to the value of the directing site. A site's PageRank value will be increased if it is linked to by a large number of sites, but increased even further with a single link from a highly valued site. For more detail on the PageRank algorithm, see the Wikipedia article.

While PageRank was critical to Google rankings during its development, more recently users have found that PageRank ratings do not necessarily correlate with high results placement. A second factor termed TrustRank circumvents the manipulation of results by spammers who purchase or sell links to boost PageRank. Sites which are known to sell links are penalized in the rankings.

AdWords

AdWords is Google's pay-per-click advertising service, where text-only advertisements appear as "sponsored links" above and to the right of the main search results. As the ads displayed are closely related and formatted similar to the search query, users are often fooled into clicking the advertisement. Advertisers bid on the amount they are willing to pay for each click from a user; a higher bid earns a higher placement in the results. 97% of Google's revenue is from AdWords advertising. More information on purchasing Google AdWords can be found here.

For more information on marketing with search engines, see below for a list of books.

Google as a Research Tool

Why not just Google?:

While it is tempting to rely on the ease of Google’s single, clean search box when faced with the numerous, complex library databases, Google is less than ideal for academic research. While it is exceptional at skimming the surface of the web and retrieving relevant results, Google is unable to search the “Invisible Web” or “Deep Web” (pages contained in dynamically generated sites, databases, password-protected content, or unlinked pages), or offer access to proprietary information as purchased by Western Libraries.

The Limits of Google:

Google does not account for bias of information, authority, or accuracy in result relevance
Google is geared toward commerce, rather than scholarly information
Auto-generated spam pages and content farms exploit Google PageRank to flood the top results with valueless links
Google’s PageRank algorithm can be manipulated (“Google Bombing”) by individuals or groups, usually with a political or humorous intent
Users tend to rely on the first page of results, assuming that if it is not a top-ranked result, it either is unimportant or does not exist
Google has been widely criticized for complying with government censorship with Google China, and for infringing on the rights of copyright owners with Google Books

Google Scholar:

Google Scholar works in much the same way as Google, but with its results restricted to scholarly publications. Due to its breadth, it can be very useful for verifying citations, locating known items, and searching interdisciplinary topics. Its functionality is similar to, but more limited than, databases such as Scopus and Web of Knowledge.

Unlike traditional Google, the results displayed are typically commercial articles, and therefore to effectively use Google Scholar as a student (to be able to click the links in the results and be directed to the full-text), you must access Google Scholar via the library catalogue or list of databases after first logging in (if off-campus).

“One way to begin is by realizing that we are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers. When we use Google to find out things on the Web, Google uses our Web searches to find out things about us.”