Cult2130joelqin's Blog

My resources!

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:39:48 +0000

Here is a bibliography of all of my resources that I have used during this whole journey. This is so that i will not be sued in any way.

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

http://mediawatch.afp.com/?post/2007/11/02/Just-How-Big-Is-Google

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/17/googlethemedia.google

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/technology/companies/29google.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Stross, Randall. ‘Introduction.’ Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. New York, London, Toronto and Sydney: Free Press, 2008. 1-19

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?pagewanted=3

Google: the end draws near.. (for me)

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:24:21 +0000

In my journey through finding out more about Google and researching it, I have come to realize that Google is an entity that has seemingly found a magic formula for success. Their ability to surprise the consumer pleasantly was always a plus point in many consumers, coupled with their laid back and less serious approach to their company. Their idea of text advertising also struck gold due to their dream for an non-advertising search engine. The applications from Google were also geared to help the consumer in their needs, so that they will never have to use another search engine or even any other website. Therefore by saying that Google monopolizes a large portion of the Internet would be true. However, the ability to influence the world has fallen short, as Google’s open policy will not reflect well with governments like China who prefer to shelter her people with censorship and control. With China not allowing the true Google to enter in, the ability to influence the world is not with Google.

In that note, I shall bring this journey to a close, learning a lot more about Google and its structure.

See you!

Google’s China problem and China’s Google problem!

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:03:48 +0000

Google and China were opposing forces in terms of political ideas and the idea of free speech. China was very against all sorts of political ideas or the new-fangled revolutions that came from the West, therefore they constantly blocked out many Western sites and its content to its Chinese people. Many website developers labelled this move as the “Great Firewall of China”, according to a New York Times article written by Clive Thompson. When Yahoo! first tried to offer its search engine to the Chinese, they were not prepared for the differences that the Chinese and the Americans have, therefore they lost out to the local search engines, even though their technology was far superior than the Chinese. Google, armed with Yahoo!’s failure in the Chinese market, tried instead to target the cosmopolitans in China, those who wanted to be like the Westerners. Before long, Google had commanded 25 per cent of the search traffic in China. However, in 2002, China had blocked Google in their country. Why was that so? One theory given by Clive Thompson was that China had not wanted to block Google entirely because it was so popular. However, the sites that China banned can be seen in Google. This means that the public can see that the website online, but will know that China had blocked the website.

What changed the Chinese government’s mind to ban Google? Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google told Clive Thompson that the “block might have been at the instigation of a competitor, which many analysts say that it was Baidu, which when Google was online, had only less than 3 percent of the market share of searches in China. Google then had to set up an office in China and operate under China’s special censorship laws in order to maintain business in China. This example was to highlight the fact that Google could not spread its ideas of free speech and a free Internet to China, hereby dismissing the notion that Google has influenced the world. By setting up an office in China so that they can operate means that they have given up the fight and instead compromised on their own beliefs, which did not went well with many people back in the United States, where Google fans believed that Google should always be for the user, not for the profits.

Googling my house takes 0.26 seconds!

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:36:47 +0000

So why has Google evolved into such a household name? And more importantly, how has that white-based website able to grasp our everyday lives, and in effect take control of the world’s Internet needs? The reason is clear. Google was able to take control of the world because it offers everything that a ordinary person needs for their daily Internet “intake”. Here is a typical example. You wake up in the morning, with the Google Alert system, and the Google Calendar reminds you that it is John Doe’s birthday today. Since you have a social circle with your friend John Doe in Google Groups, you alerted everyone and called them for drinks in the evening. You search for a good bar in Google’s search engine and it turns up a number of websites where the bar has a good reputation. You then jot the address down in Google Documents and then send it to your Google Mobile app in your mobile phone. You then go to the bar after work with your friends and have a good time. And when you reach back home, you start to blog about the event at your Blogger, and post up the outrageous videos of John Doe in Youtube. After checking that you set the Google Alert to wake you up tomorrow, you then fall back to sleep, prepared with Google for the next day.

That had all the makings of a Google advertisement, but there could be a chance that some people are already living their lives dependant on Google’s applications, which are targeted to help consumers in their everyday lives. By anticipating and taking over the consumers’ everyday lives, Google will get a higher chance of people using their website and their applications and will be exposed to Google’s advertising. However, not enough in the world uses all the applications except for web searches, reading blogs, and viewing videos, many still trusting the alarm clock to wake them up. Therefore, to say that Google has influenced the world would not be a very truthful statement, but saying that Google is trying to influence the world is certainly a fair one.

Google: a game of Monopoly? and winning?

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:54:21 +0000

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.

Google’s text-ads imps brought in the gold!

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:22:07 +0000

As mentioned previously, Google’s rise to being such a huge company was due to its advertising, or more specifically, text-based advertising. Now what did Google do that made its consumers and customers so happy that these AdWords became so successful? According to Randell Stross, in his book Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, he mentioned how Brin and Page, the company’s founders were adamant about allowing advertising in their search engine. They have even criticized search engines that were funded by advertisers and stated that they were “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers”. Therefore, when they started Google, Brin and Page were apprehensive about allowing advertising in Google. After a few meetings, they decided to introduce advertising as an experiment, restricting the format to three very short lines of text and a Web address, and the link will only appear when the consumer types on a keyword or a relevant search term, hereby creating the text-advertisement. Also, the advertiser will only have to pay if the visitor clicks on the advertiser’s link, offering advertisers a risk-free solution to their advertising problem.

However, the initial text advertisements were displayed so little that they went largely unseen. Even a year on since its inception, analysts and journalists still could not understand how Google could make money from such an advertising system. The only source of income that was apparent was the outsourcing of Google’s search engine to other larger companies such as Yahoo!, that at that time it seemed to be as good a revenue as advertising. The whole text-advertising idea was so unorthodox that even some of Google’s employees felt that Google will sooner or later succumb to having banners in their home page. However, these unprepossessing text advertisements were slowly but surely gaining popularity amongst the advertisers, being one of the most cost effective innovations in the recent years. Instead of conducting mass advertising to those who may not want to hear of see that advertisement, Google allowed them to reach those consumers who needs that product or service, allowing a better reception to the advertisement and obviously a higher success rate. This proved to sparked the economical growth in Google and to date, approximately US$16.5 billion or revenue were funded by these text-advertising alone, with 99% of its revenue still generated by those simple text advertisements. Indeed, these text-ads formed the basis of truthfulness that a truthful business can boom into a true money making industry, without relying on the unscrupulous bombardment of advertisements to an unreceptive customer. This can also relate to companies that want to stick by the rules and not play “dirty”, and the Google story can inspire them in that way.

Google’s mammoth size.

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:04:07 +0000

So just how big is Google? When it first started they only have four employees and it was working out of a garage. Now, according to AFP approximately 11 years later, it is the fifth largest company in the United States of America (USA), with an approximate net worth of US$222 billion counted in 2008, and a share of Google in the IPO costs over US$700 now. There are a total of 19604 employees in Google worldwide, and 60 percent of the world’s Internet searches are made on Google. Google also has their websites converted into 112 languages, even to Klingon, which is a popular fictional language from the movie Star Trek. The Google search engine increases its index of web pages in the Internet almost daily, and it is said by now the index would have reached a trillion pages and would still be increasing. The Googleplex, the headquarters of Google Inc., is said to have costed $319 million. Therefore, Google is big, and with 60% of the Internet searches, they comprise of the Internet monopoly.

Google’s humble beginnings.

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:30:06 +0000

The first meeting that formed Google actually took place in 1995 at a Stanford dormitory, with only two members present, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. They created a search engine called BackRub, which is so successful operating in the Stanford servers that the search engine took up to much bandwidth to suit the university. Therefore, after they graduated, they formed their own company in 1997 and named themselves Google, a play on the word “googol”, a mathematical term represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes, symbolizing their initial mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. When Sun Microsystems wrote them a check for $100,000 to further develop their search engine in August 1998, they expanded quickly, announcing the first billion-URL index in June 2000, making Google the largest search provider. They also released AdWords, which is a combination of the words “advertise” and “words”, by offering their customers’ services to consumers who searches keywords that linked to their customers at a very low cost. With this advertising revenue, they quickly expanded and before long acquired Double-Click, an additional service that will provide display advertising revenue to complement the AdWords, hereby turning into a behemoth advertiser in the online world. They have documented all this in their Milestones part of Google’s corporate website.

Google!

cult2130joelqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:17:24 +0000

Hi everyone, this is Joel Qin from University of Newcastle! I’ll be sharing more about Google’s rise to being a huge monopoly and has been such an influence to many organizations.

Throughout this journey, i will be trying to answer the statement that Google monopolizes a large portion of the Internet and that Google’s popularity results from its ability to influence the world through advertising and its services.

see you for now!

Hello world!

cult2130joelqin — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:57:33 +0000

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