Google can be considered a late comer in the search engine business and yet the name has become synonymous with online search nowadays, proving that a first mover does not always have the advantage.

Started in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brinn while they were taking their PHDs at Stanford University, Google has a market capitualisation of US$179.07bn with a net income of US$4.203bn and it employs 19,156 employees worldwide.  Yet what is now the largest American company has its beginnings as a research project (”Project “Backrub”) which checked backlinks to estimate a site’s importance, thus creating a better ranking of results.

Personally, I use Yahoo! but the success of Google has often intrigued me. Despite the 3 years advantage that Yahoo! has over Google (Yahoo! was incorporated in 1995 while Google in 1998), Google has managed to displace Yahoo! in terms of search and advertising revenue. Such phenomenal success has been attributed to the more effective algorithm employed by Google for its search engine and also the simple and intuitive user interface.

Google is also known for its innovativeness and it has developed many revenue avenues such as adsense and adwords which propels Google to become the market leader in terms of advertising revenue (Something Microsoft is bent on stopping by attempting to acquire Yahoo).

Don’t be evil is the unofficial slogan for Google and it embodies their philosophy of adopting a baseline for decision making that can enhance the trust and image of the corporation and not compromising on its long term profitability. Perhap this is why they have been identified multiple times as the best place to work for by Fortune Magazine ( A friend of mine told me she’s allowed to bring her pet to work, and they have open concept office with lots of beanies). Hopefully we will be able to find out whether it’s true when we are there.

A bit of gossip here… reports has it that Google was planning the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple iPhone. However, this may be one of the many Easter Eggs that the company is well known for.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 4:13 am and is filed under Google, Organizational Writeups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.