The Rise and Rise of Google

History

Google was launched as a search engine in 1998. Google’s “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It quickly rose to be the most popular and largest search engine and apparently has over 200 million queries through its various service daily.

This information was sourced from the following informative sources:

• Google on Wikipedia
• Google Corporate Profile and Information

Why is it so popular

Google is popular for several reasons:

• The homepage has a simple interface which has no advertising
• The interface is not cluttered by groups of topics like other engines
• Fast Searches (less than 1 second and you are usually told so)
• Seemingly accurate searches
• Uses relevance ranking to build a list of hits. It sends out web spiders to go across the internet to build up a list of sites on its hard-drive and uses the number of links to a site to determine how likely it is to be of use for the person searching.

Miscellaneous Information

Here is a thought provoking article from the The Economist about the rise of Google and the concerns that people have raised about the company as it has attained such a monolithic status.

Finally, Google’s share price has done pretty well for itself since its IPO! The rise continues...

Last Minute Update- **YouTube** Acquisition

Google’s amazing foray into online video advertising which the company sees as the next potential gold mine, has been given a huge boost and sent ripples through the industry with its planned acquisition of video-sharing pioneer YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion - a company that has still to make a profit!

YouTube’s co-founders and other investors will be receiving their payment in Google stock - a currency which has increased by more than fivefold since the company’s initial public offering in August 2004 at the bargain IPO price of $85. Read full article here.

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