Google Inc :: GOOG :: GGQ1 :: Company Profile :: Corporate Profile

Google Inc. (GOOG , GGQ1) has become, in just over a dozen years, one of the pre-eminent internet stock companies and this company / corporate profile details the most relevant Google Inc. company / corporate information.

Google Inc. relies on it's position as the leading company in web crawling, indexing and searching to generate income from advertising programs presented both on it's search result pages as well as on third-party web-sites that utilise Google Inc.'s Adsense program. The majority of Google Inc.'s income is generated from this revenue but Google is diversifying gradually into other web-based offerings that should generate income in the future.

To “google” is so much part of our everyday internet language that we may be forgiven for assuming that Google Inc.'s ubiquitous search engine was one of the first to be established. Those of us of a certain age can remember that this is far from the truth. There were many search engines that came (and went) before. Who remembers the heyday of Altavista?

Google Inc. was not even the first to explore the strategy of analysing the relationships between websites (PageRank) as a method of improving search results over the competition method of counting the number of times the search term appeared on the page. Backlinking was already being explored by the search engine Rankdex.

Google Inc. (GOOG) Stock Price and analytics: GOOG

Google, the search engine, started out as “Backrub”, reflecting the backlinking strategy, but was changed to reflect the notion that the number of websites it would eventually index would be a googol. Google is a misspelling of googol and was chosen in order to be unique for branding purposes by Page and Brin, the originators of Google, to elaborate on.

Whatever the history, the Google search engine, the product for which Google Inc is best known, has become the predominant force in the internet search market. This has led to the company becoming extremely profitable on the back of its nowadays seemingly proprietary advertising product. But here again the model had been 'borrowed' from Goto.com, latterly Overture Services, which sued Google Inc. for alleged infringements of their pay-per-click and bidding patents.

Overture was bought by Yahoo Inc., and Google Inc. settled out of court by issuing common stock to Yahoo in exchange for a perpetual licence. This was the second time that Yahoo Inc. had benefited from Google's popularity as they had owned 8.4 million shares before Google's initial public offering (IPO). At $85 per share this gave a paper value of nearly $700 million.

Although Google, the search engine, is the predominant face of Google Inc., the company now has many diverse, though internet-related, products in its portfolio. These have, in the main, been acquired:

• Earth Viewer was developed by Keyhole Inc. which was acquired by Google Inc. in 2004 and renamed as Google Earth.

• YouTube, the personal video site, was bought in 2005.

• 2007 saw DoubleClick purchased which opened up the web publisher and advertising agencies relationships.

• Grand Central was also bought the same year and rebranded as Google Voice.

• On2 Technologies, a video software maker, was bought out in 2009.

• Aardvark, a social network search engine, was also bought in 2009.

• 2010 saw the acquisition of Agnilux, a computer hardware company.

• 2010 also saw the acquisition of Global IP Solutions, a provider of web-based teleconferencing services.

• AdMob, a mobile ad network was purchased in May 2010.

Google Inc. has also partnered with:

• NASA Ames Research Center to build office accommodation for research projects;

• Sun Microsystems to share and distribute each others products;

• AOL to enhance video search services;

• Microsoft, Nokia and Ericsson to finance the .mobi TLD;

• Fox Interactive Media to provide search and advertising on MySpace, the social networking site.

• GeoEye to launch a satellite to provide high-res imagery for Google Earth;

• Life Magazine to host their photograph archive;

• NextEra Energy to generate wind power in North Dakota, USA.

The majority of Google Inc.'s revenue is generated from advertising programs. The use of technologies to determine user interests has boosted targeted advertising by presenting relevant adverts according to both context and user preferences.

Google Analytics allows in-depth research into user interaction with a website thus allowing website owners to direct users in the 'right' direction to maximise advertising revenues.

Google Adwords allows advertisers to have their text-only adverts to be placed on third-party websites, thus increasing coverage. Google Adsense allows website owners to have these adverts displayed in specified positions on their web pages to generate income from ads clicked upon.

Google Inc.'s products include:

• Web search engine – the dominant search product in many countries. Google indexes trillions of web pages.

• Image search engine.

• News – an automated news aggregator.

• GoogleMaps – formerly Google local, a web mapping service.

• Video – video sharing and video search engine.

• Desktop – search engine that indexes and retrieves your desktop computer files.

• Google Books – searches the full text of books and allows limited previewing.

• Blogger - Google's blogging program
• Gmail – webmail, POP3 and IMAP service with large storage capacity.

• Google Docs – web-based collaborative word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form and data storage product.

• Calendar – web-based time-management product.

• Site Search - search engine for medium to large corporate intranets and web-sites.

• Google Mini – search engine for small corporate intranets and web-sites.

• Google Apps – online communication and collaboration product.

• Translate – text and website translation service.

• Google Android – operating system for mobile devices.

• Google Wave – shared web space for discussion and collaboration.

• Chrome – web-browser.

• Picasa – photo and picture sharing product.

• Adwords – advertising platform.

• Adsense – contextual advertising solution for web publishers.

• Analytics – tracking and measuring of advertising campaigns.

Google Inc. has often received criticism on issues such as:

• Copyright - Google's policy of caching content brought a copyright infringement complaint from The New York Times - not upheld. The policy of scanning and copying books brought a class action law suit from The Author's Guild.
• Censorship - criticism has also come about censorship of sites in China.
• Privacy - Google has been ranked 'hostile to privacy' by Privacy International. Questions have been raised about Google's storage of cookies, user data logs, PageRank algorithms, and scanning of Gmail emails. There are also allegations related to supposed connections with the NSA and the CIA.

How To Google - homepage of "Google How To".

How To Google in English - for the English version index to "Google How To" subjects.