Overview and History of Google Inc.

Gentlemen
I will publish this as a word doc on our uni site and I will email it to you directly as well:

• 
  Google began in 1996 as a collaboration of two Stanford doctoral students: Sergey Brin and Larry Page on a search engine known as ‘BackRub’. That engine, uniquely, analysed back links (the information that points to a website).
  
• The space demands of the search engine outgrew the student’s ability to satisfy the need. Sergey Brin began looking for business partners who, by licensing the use of the search tool would allow the students to afford the equipment they needed.- demonstrated the engine to Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Systems) who provided them with the seed capital for their company.
  
• By 1999 Google was answering >500,000 calls daily and had begun signing up major organisations that needed a webpresence and searching tool (Netscape, AOL).
  
• From 2000 Google began diversifying from being strictly a web page search tool. Functionality it has created or bought and badge reengineered include:
  AdWords: a keyword targeted advertising program
  Google Toolbar: an add in for a persons web browser using google;
  Google Zeitgeist[1] – now Google HotTrends: identifies most popular trends
  Image Search: search tool for images based on meta data
  Googlebot: an automated software tool that continually crawls the web updating
  pages links etc
  GoogleCompute: similar to SETI allows people to donate unused computer cycles to
  unis that need computational power
  Froogle: online food shopping
  Google Labs: have the general public beta test potential products
  GoogleNews: latest news from 1>400 newspapers & media outlets
  Blogger: web logs
  GoogleCalendar: online calendar that people can share
  GoogleAdSense: places highly targeted ads next to search content
  Gmail: an email address for people
  GoogleSMS have information from searches sent directly to mobile devices
  GoogleEarth images of the planet from satellites
  GoogleSitemaps prioritise the pages crawled on a site
  GoogleTalk early form of Skype
  GoogleBlogSearch search tool for trawling blogs
  GoogleBase a structured tool for uploading information
  GoogleAnalytics a tool that analyses the effectiveness of pages and content
  GooglePrint a public domain book search tool can now download PDF copies of the
  book
  GoogleChat integration of email and texting from mobile devices
  GoogleCheckout secure, fast convenient shopping service
  GoogleGroups the updated version of Usenet
  Knol: the Google version of Wikipedia
  Google.org Google’s philanthropic company
  
• To date Google “own” 88% of the search market in Australia alone and have > 100 domains!
  
• Google have acquired companies that have them provided them with service that are offered free to the online community – such as PryaLabs for blogs, and Keyhole Corporation for digital and satellite images (GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps), YouTube.
  
• Like NEC Google has been very selective and yet audacious in its partnership arrangements. For example it has partnerships with eBay (advertising), with Fox Integrated Media (thus linking to MySpace), most of the mobile phone companies (Motorola, Vodaphone, Telefonica KDDI).
  
• Google has strategic alliances with Intuit, Dell Computers, Sky Broadcasting
  
• Google has recently acquired Adscape – an innovative in-game advertiser, Trendanalyser – whose software generates dynamic graphics and special effects, and Zenter – presentation tools.
  
• Google have begun looking at the use of IT in the Healthcare industry and have recently released a beta version of their own browser “Chrome”.
  
  
• Google conforms to the Seven People Management Practices developed by Pfeffer and Veiga. These being:-
  1. Employment Security;
  2. Selective Hiring;
  3. Self Managed Teams and Decentralised as basic elements of Organisation Design (e.g. AdSense is operated and developed in Hyderabad in India)
  4. Comparatively high compensation contingent on organisational performance;
  5. Extensive training;
  6. Reduction of status differences
  7. Share information
  
  
• Google has created and developed new markets for its advertisement income stream– such as paying bloggers to place ads on their pages and increasing the revenue it obtains in the process
  
  
  [1] Zeitgeist (German) = Spirit of the times