The Genius that is Google

Google, one of America's richest public corporations, has been on the scene since 1998. To amass a worth of over $23 billion, these folks must be doing something right. But what?

Google began as a research project by two California guys in 1996. They theorized that by analyzing relationships between websites, a search engine could produce more accurate and better results than existing techniques. At that time, search engines placed results in positions based on how many times a search term appeared on an individual page. Let's take a step back and think about the simple brilliance of this idea. Say one day you don't feel much like working, but are hoping to fill your head with celebrity fluff, you search "Lindsay Lohan" or "Paris Hilton." With the old technique for search engines, you could, feasibly, end up with one-hundred websites that simply list the words "Lindsay Lohan" (or Paris Hilton) over and over again. But using a search engine that analyzes the relationships between sites, what rises to the top of the ranks are legitimate, useful and helpful websites. And how do we know they are useful and legitimate? Because other websites think so as well. The well-ranked sites will have incoming links that are about Lindsay or Paris, and they will have outgoing links to websites that have this content as well.

Along the way, Google has acquired many a software company that have helped their empire grow in every direction. Have you heard of Google Earth? No doubt you've seen it used on CNN a time or two and hadn't realized it. Google Earth uses satellite images to piece together the landscape of our planet. It allows you to "fly" from one place to another, anywhere in the world. Depending on the depth-accuracy of the satellite image, you can zoom so close to the land you can almost touch the tops of buildings. I've used Google Earth to help my middle-schooler visualize the topography of Portugal for a social studies report, as well as to help my other two children visualize the distance between their house, and their aunts. It is an exciting tool for children (and adults) to explore everything from the Grand Canyon to ice fields to deserts and everything in between.

Google also acquired Blogger.com, the premiere blogging site on the internet today. Blogging has become an enormously powerful and financially lucrative publishing system. The internet has turned nearly everyone into a writer, and blogs have certainly attributed to this phenomenon.

More recently, Google acquired YouTube, possibly the most well-known video sharing website/service on the internet today. YouTube does not pay users for videos, but it did recently offer some of it's most well-viewed users to become partners in the company, allowing these best known users to earn revenue through advertisements placed near their videos.

Google has managed to incorporate as part of its empire three avenues that best exploit what internet users want from their internet today - the ability to "find" places; the ability to chat and voice their own opinions; and the ability to view and upload their own video creations. More brilliance.

It is also fairly well known that being an employee for Google has its definite upside. For years, the laid back attitude was paramount at their Mountain View, California location, or "Googleplex." The lobby is playfully decorated with lava lamps, pianos and other "search" whimsies. The hallways have bicycles and exercise balls to encourage play, and breakrooms are filled with all sorts of goodies. Google allows each employee to spend 20% of its work time (about one day) on projects they are interested in. The folks at Google realized that many of their new product launches resulted from that 20%. Some of these projects include AdSense and Gmail. Google appointed a Chief Culture Officer in 2006, in an attempt to maintain the relaxed culture and collaborative environment.

Hmm... lava lamps, a day off to pursue my own interests and gummy bears in the breakroom? Google obviously knows how to keep it's employees happy.

Speaking of Adsense. Let's talk a moment about this sheer bit of brilliance. Google generates relevant ads to be placed on websites. The website owner and Google each earn money every time someone clicks on the ad. Does anyone really know how many Adsense ads there are on the internet? Possibly millions. This is genius for two reasons; Google earns lots and lots of money, and, they have surreptitiously bypassed one of their own "rules" and that is (as taken from Google's own webmaster support pages): - how many of us have landed on pages that contain nothing at all besides Google Adsense? Sure, the ads are relevant to your search, but did they serve to tell you anything at all about Lindsay Lohan's rehabilitation? No. Thus, there are countless pages out there with nothing at all to do but wait for a lonely user to click on the ads they contain.

Google Desktop is one of the most recent Google projects, but this time, instead of stepping out into the world, they've stepped inside your own computer. When you install this little beastie, it will index all of your hard drive's files for you and make them easily accessible from, (of course), your desktop. Find photos, email, weather, news, all with a single keystroke. What could be easier! Except... it all seems a bit intrusive for some people. Just as a grocery card, when used, can target your household with specific coupons, eventually Google Desktop may do the same. But what else might come of this indexable information? What else might Google do, say, when the information on your computer reveals you're planning a Tahitian vacation? This would, obviously be a encroaching on the user's privacy, but what if that privacy were relinquished simply by not checking off a little box? (Just as it is?)

Lastly, Google has become a genericized trademark, much like "Jell-o" or "Kleenex." People, when speaking of searching on the internet remark, "I'll google it," regardless of whether they're using Google or not. But with a 74% of the total market share (which includes all of the search engines that use Google to generate their own search results), I'd say they're all pretty much on target.