Questions:
Questions :
Explain Google’s business model.
1. Who are their competitors?
2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?
3. How competitive are they in the market?
4. What new services do they offer?
5. What makes them so unique?
6. How competitive are they in the international market?
As we all know, Google is one of the famous search engines in the world. I guess everyone knows what google is right?! If you don't know then "GOOGLE IT"! .
Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31) the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour.
While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006, Google announced the purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
Software
The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant search engine in the US market, with a market share of 65.6%. Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps,
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.
- Google's Top Three Competitors :
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
- How have they used information technology to their advantage?
Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues
improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads come in. It’s beautiful.
It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.
- Google's Competitive Advantages
Google's work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees in Mountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered a free labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world's number one search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google's rules, register their sitemaps and ping Google's services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google a huge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don't have the same level of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEO friendly tools and advise.
> Extra data - Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc
With its customized search service, Google Co-op, users don't only create vertical a search engine - they also give Google very valuable domain-specific information.
Also, by tagging images on Image Labeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google's Image Search.
>Google knows everything about your site
Today many sites use it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool is that it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if all sites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute
pageranks, as it would have the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites use Google Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.
The recently acquired FeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It's not only a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring site popularity.
> Google knows a lot about you - Personalization
Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about your personality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with more personalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searches for programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE's latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail, visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox -- well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological, but programming related :-)
>Google offers UNIVERSAL search
Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It also crawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map's Street View lets you drive around big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Google search.
> Google has psychological dominance
The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it is indispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other search engines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated - e.g your purpose is more about researching than finding - then you always want to try your search on Google as well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.
> Google is everywhere
OK, let's say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, such as:
ü If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google top of mind;
ü If you go to CNN.com, you have Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a new URL for search?
ü If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider, home page and feed subscriber.
I could go on, but the point is - there's no escape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also the success of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.
> Google has looooooots of ca$h
As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots of cash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high. In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any innovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.
- Google’s new services
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB. (14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)
· Google Nexus One
Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone. (January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)
· Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.” (Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)
· Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on
that image. (December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)
· Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security. (December 5th 2009 by serverguy
- What makes them so unique?
Getting a website to attain a high ranking position in Google search engine means great success. The higher the Google ranking the more traffic it gives to the site thus making more money from advertisers.
Reaching a high rank is not easy and it requires time and effort. In addition to that, one needs to read the latest news and trends on Internet marketing especially new Google SEO techniques. Among the top three search engines, Google has a very unique algorithm meaning it can have its own SEO techniques. Because of this, one might actually conclude that it is an on-going Google SEO work. Everyday Google SEO trends change so it requires continuous research to keep up with it.
There are lots of factors to consider than just being a user friendly site. High PR rank links, good content and age of the site can definitely take you up there.
Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important factors to consider when doing Google SEO. Google's system has a way to determine if the link is more valuable than the others. How does one determine the value of the link? Take into consideration the link's age, location, anchor text, relevancy and page rank.
Another factor to consider is the age of a domain. The older the domain name is, the higher its value. Google gives importance to this because they consider an old site a legal and reputable one thus giving it a higher ranking.
Good content is definitely the best way to get your site to a high rank especially if one uses top ranking keywords. Aside from that, the content needs to be informative and relevant to visitors of the website. It should be well written and interesting so that it can generate a great amount of traffic.
Aside from these factors and as part of one's Google SEO efforts, one must view their site from the standpoint of their audience. It should be user friendly and can capture right away the visitor's attention. It pays to invest on a good designer and programmer to complement the Google SEO techniques. Remember that Google SEO techniques are unique thus it has a set of guidelines different from the rest. Remember these and the Google SEO plan will definitely pay off.
REFERENCES:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/competing_with_google_search.php
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ashow/129.html
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
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