Google: The Search Engine Giant
Google is a US-based multinational technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the year 1996, while they were Ph.D. students at the Stanford University, California. It is popular for its online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software and hardware related Internet Services.
Initially, the founders together owned about 14 percent of Google’s shares and controlled 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. Later, on September 4, 1998, Google was incorporated as a privately held company. In 2004, Google moved its Headquarters from Menlo Park, California to Googleplex, Mountain View, California.
Parent and Subsidiaries
Presently, Google functions as a leading subsidiary of Alphabet, which is a conglomerate of various interests which were under Google before August 2015. Sundar Pichai took in charge as the CEO of Google on October 2, 2015, after restructuring was completed. Larry Page is the current CEO of Google’s parent body, Alphabet.
As a result of its rapid growth since its incorporation, Google has triggered a acquisitions, partnerships, and chain of products beyond its core Search Engine. It offers Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for services designed for work and productivity, Gmail for Email services, Google Calendar for Scheduling and Time Management, Google Drive for Cloud Storage, Google+ as a Social Networking Platform, Google Hangouts for Instant messaging and Video Chat Services, Google Translate for various Language Translations, Google Maps for mapping and turn-by-turn navigation, Youtube for Video sharing, Google Keep for notes sharing and Google Photos for Organizing and editing photos.
Market Value
A renowned company that monitors commercial web traffic started Google as the most visited website in the world. Several other Google Services like YouTube, Gmail, and Blogger were also featured in the list of top most visited websites in the world. A report released in August 2011 mentioned that Google has almost one million servers in the data centers across the world. On an average, Google has processed about one billion search requests per day throughout 2009. Google was named as the second most valuable brand in the world for four consecutive years. It has reported a valuation of US$ 133 billion in 2016. It is stated that around 57,100 employees are working for Google currently. It also holds a record of processing 20 petabytes of data every day in the year 2008. Google made its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in August 2014, right before shifting its headquarters to Googleplex.
How does it work?
The initial search engines displayed results based on how many times the search terms appeared on the page. This was certainly not the most efficient way for a search engine to operate. This realization led Larry Page and Sergey Brin to design a new technology which they named as PageRank. PageRank technology analyses the relations between the websites, it determines the relevance of a website by the number of pages it contains and the importance of those pages.
The software behind Google’s search technology conducts a series of calculations which requires about a fraction of a second. It uses over a 100 signals, which also includes, Google’s patented PageRank technology to analyze the entire link structure of the web and thus determines which pages are the most important. As the next step, a hyperlink-matching is conducted to analyze the most relevant pages for the current search terms. By combining these steps Google provides the most relevant and reliable results first.
Conclusion
This efficient mechanism has what made Google an unmatched Search Engine Giant. Many new names are making an appearance in the search engines list. But none of them seem to give a serious competition to Google. This is mostly because of the initiatives were taken up by google, to constantly enforce innovative reforms and upgradations in their service.
