CASE STUDY OF GOOGLE

CASE STUDY: GOOGLE

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. 

Google facts:-

• Founded
  1998
• Founders
  Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• Incorporation
  September 4, 1998
• Initial public offering (NASDAQ)
  August 19, 2004
• Headquarters
  1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
  Mountain View
  CA 94043
• 
  

Our culture

It’s really the people that make Google the kind of company it is. We hire people who are smart and determined, and we favor ability over experience. Although Googlers share common goals and visions for the company, we hail from all walks of life and speak dozens of languages, reflecting the global audience that we serve. And when not at work, Googlers pursue interests ranging from cycling to beekeeping, from frisbee to foxtrot.

We strive to maintain the open culture often associated with startups, in which everyone is a hands-on contributor and feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. In our weekly all-hands (“TGIF”) meetings—not to mention over email or in the cafe—Googlers ask questions directly to Larry, Sergey and other execs about any number of company issues. Our offices and cafes are designed to encourage interactions between Googlers within and across teams, and to spark conversation about work as well as play.

Innovations at Google Google management also focused on encouraging innovation and creativity at the workplace. It realized that to maintain its growth, the company had to come out with new products/features. However, the company faced problems on how to tap ideas that could be turned into successful products. Said Silverstein, "We always had great ideas, but we didn't have a good way of expressing them or capturing them." To overcome the problem, Google set up an internal web page for tracking new ideas... Google's Organizational Culture Google had an informal work culture at Googleplex (its headquarters). Both Larry and Sergey wanted to make Google a fun place to work. Reflecting their beliefs, the Googleplex was decorated with Lava Lamps and painted in the bright colors of the Google Logo (Refer Figure I for Google Logo). Googlers were allowed to bring their pets in to the workplace, and were themselves provided with free snacks, lunch and dinner prepared by a celebrity chef Charlie Ayers. The Googleplex had snack rooms offering Googlers cereals, gummi bears, cashew nuts and other snacks along with fruit juices, soda and cappuccino... GOOGLE AS A SEARCH ENGINE Search Engines, especially Google have evolved technologically (amongst other parameters) over the years. The computing power of the software and hardware now deployed by the search giant can better be assessed in terms of the functions it performs and its wide reach. How Search Engines Work Broadly speaking, search engines’ functions can be divided into three: * Crawling This is the use of special software commonly known as bots, crawlers or spiders to access information on various websites through principally three means: 1. Links from other websites already in the search engine’s index or gathered while crawling 2. Url’s/links submitted by webmasters 3. Sitemaps submitted by webmasters Ordinarily one would visualize the bots as some crawling objects moving rapidly all over the web via links to reach different websites in performing its tasks. However, in reality that is not the case. It operates from a particular physical location and is akin to your web browser. It operates by sending various requests to the web servers from which it downloads/fetches various information on new web pages, updated web pages and dead links which are all used to update it’s index. As web pages are crawled, new links detected on these web pages are added to the engine’s list of pages to crawl. In the process of crawling, the engines encounter challenges in the sense that there is a trade off between minimizing the resources it spends on crawling and maintaining an up to date index. It tries to avoid re-indexing an unchanged web page while it strives to capture all changed web pages in order to keep its index always current. * Indexing The search engines stores the pages it’s crawlers retrieve from various web pages in a massive index database. It sorts this information based on search terms and arranges it in alphabetical order. This sorting enables rapid retrieval of documents from the index when search queries demand them. It processes the words in the web pages noting the location of the keywords within the pages e.g. title tags, alt attributes. The engines do process many, but not all content types. As an illustration, it cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages. To improve search performance, the search engines ignore (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). These words are so common and do little to narrow a search, and therefore can safely be ignored. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, in addition to converting all letters to lowercase, to improve it’s performance. * Search Query Processor This is what most search users are conversant with and in fact quite often erroneously regard as the “search engine”. It comprises some components with the most visible being the search box or interface through which the search user interacts with the search engine, forwarding his search query for processing. When a user sends in a query through the interface, the index rapidly retrieves the most relevant documents for the search query. Relevance is determined algorithmically based on many ranking factors numbering over 200. A key factor amongst these is PageRank which is a measure of the importance of a web page. This is determined by the number and quality of links pointing to the web page. It is however important to stress that not all links are equal as links emanating from high ranked web pages is considered more powerful than links from low ranked web pages.