The power of Google has in the Internet is astounding. Through the Milestones page of the Google corporate website, there are various acquisitions dotted around the company’s 11 year history. Every acquisition were planned to help Google maintain their control over the Internet, in relation to how the Internet is evolving at every time. The first acquisition in 2001 was a company called Usenet Newsgroup Search, a discussion service that was acquired from Deja.com. This was to help improve Google’s search on the Internet by updating its search index. An acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting in 2006 improved AdWords’ capability of having both text and a radio advertising spectrum for the company. However the most significant ones are the acquisition of Pyra Labs in 2003, bringing the popular weblog website, Blogger, to Google, which incidentally could place advertisements in 1.1 million users of Blogger at that time. Also, Keyhole Corp, which was acquired in 2004, produced what is called Google Earth, which was thus far a piece of revolutionary software that no other search engine can rival yet. Double-Click was acquired in 2008 to bring in display advertising for AdWords, so that advertisers can use both display and text advertising so that the advertising attraction can be further improved. Finally, Google acquired Youtube in 2006 so that Google can delve into the increasingly popular home video experience by having a jumpstart. It can also promote its advertisers in a whole new dimension of the Internet too.
What all these acquisitions tell us is that Google is expanding, and expanding big. By having 60% of the market share of the Internet, Google maintains its strength as the gatekeepers of information. Google’s profits amount to billions of dollars and the engineers in Google can even try new ideas just for fun. Many other companies can only envy the benefits that Google gives to its employees, since Google is only one of the few companies with the financial muscle capable of doing this. Randell Stross said that Google controls 60% of the market share, while its closest competitor, Yahoo!, only had 20%, and MSN Search only had 5.9%. That is a lot of difference, especially when the total market value was a whopping US$40 billion dollar industry, deriving the number from Google’s calculated market share and its reported revenue for 2008.
