The Google Project

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Executive Summary

Google is all about maintaining an index of web sites and other web contents and making their information available for free to anyone who can connect to the Internet. Google’s vast on-line index, along with its automated search technology and discovery gives Internet users the privilege to access relevant information in an instant. The company constantly upgrades its products and services to optimize the searches of its users. They however sinful “products” according to importance and value to the majority and according to the improvements that these products may give to the users. Thus, more and more people use Google search more frequently than other search engines because the results or the hits that they get are of great importance to them.

Google, however, evolved into something more than just a mere search engine, it offers more than different services that are simply helpful to many. One is its email service, the Gmail, which allows everybody from different corners of the world to communicate with each other. It also features its Google Maps to support the geographic and/or spatial needs of its users, as well as its Google Desktop Search, which was enhanced to serve additional file formats, email clients and browsers. Specialized information such as weather and movies are also provided through the convenient links of Google. Google has about 41 services to offer under the categories Search, Explore and Innovate, Communicate, Reveal and Share, Mobile and Computer Optimization.

Google aims to near every race, and every culture around the globe. As of now, users from around the world visit their very own destination sites in 136 international domains at www.google.com. Even the Google interface is available in 116 different languages. Because of its expansion, the company always finds itself in the clouds of controversies with a number of foreign and domestic laws due to the way Google affects companies that conduct business on the Internet. Thus, it is but imperative to look closely on how Google became the company that it has become today. What are the company’s management tools? How did it manage to combat all the issues that were thrown their ways? These we shall answer on the following pages.

Google as a Project

The project was considered to be “accidental” on the onset while the “perpetrators” seemed ready to bite each other’s heads with their obnoxious yet intelligent ideas. The first meeting of minds happened at Stanford University on the summer of 1995. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the “scientists” behind the success of Google never even felt love at first sight. They instantly debated on the first day they met, the topic of which they found interest with was the value of diverse approaches to urban planning. However, it doesn’t take a genius to gape that their daily bantering would lead to the birth of a unique idea as both are competent and intellectual in the field of computer science.

Page wasn’t really incline to looking out and discovering a better way to search as he hound himself attracted to the World Wide Web. He was more intrigue with the reversed side of it. Page and Brin worked together to reverse engineer Tim Berner-Lee’s World Wide Web, which leads to the birth of Google. The belief is to create a virtual crawler that will trace back the links (hits) of a certain search item, they call this a practice of building up one’s own work by pointing out to the works of others. The engine was good alright, in fact, it was far too good that Page and Brin were inspired to name it Google, after “googol”, a number followed by 100 zeroes because it expands into a wider horizon. The founders released the first version of Google on Stanford’s website a year after they met, in August 1996.

Starting the company was never easy. In fact, the founders weren’t even sure they liked the idea of going all the burdens and problems of starting and running a company of their own. But since the engine was a real buzz in the four corners of Stanford University, and through the edging of their professors in the Graduate Studies, they finally gave it a try. September 1998 — Google Inc. was incorporated in California. August 2003 – Google Inc. was reincorporated in Delaware.

The transition from a school project to a corporate project was never easy for Page and Brin. There were issues that they have to battle with, controversies to deal with. However, to tip the scale, they also have their elegant share of winnings as a company for almost a decade now.

Overview of Google

Google founders Page and Brin have a mission, it is to organize all information in this world and make it accessible and useful not just globally but universally. Now, Google is widely recognized as the world’s largest and most important search engine. Its utilities which are developed with usability and reliability as its foundation made Google one of the world’s best brands. Google even owe this distinction almost entirely through the “word of mouth” advertisement from its fully elated users.

But since Google is but still a business, not everything is for free. Google generates income by allowing advertisers of different brands and industries the opportunity to showcase their brands, products and services on a strategic page or location. These advertisements are considered to be measurable and very cost-effective since millions and millions of people around the world use the Internet on a daily basis.

Now, Google strives to live on how others conception it – that is, “the closest thing the web has to offer as an ultimate answer machine“.

Organization Breakdown

Since its foundation from two significant brains, Google has grown into more than 10,000 employees around the world. Its management team is composed of the most experienced and savvy technology professionals in the industry. Figure 1 shows how Google organized its primary human resources.

Google’s Stakeholders

Google Inc. considers its webmasters and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) its primary stakeholders. The former rely on Google for its crawling and indexing concern as well as its services that can further enhance and increase traffic to their websites and effectively and efficiently connect them to their visitors. The latter on the other hand rely on Google’s technology to advice website owners on their region architecture and channeling their sites to a more relevant list of Google directories.

However, in general, Google has its employees, its Internet community, its shareholders, its investors, and professional organizations on web as stakeholders of the company.

Google’s Time Frame

Google has a colorful milestone, each highlighting its remarkable impact in the Internet world.

1995-1997

The days before Google was born; it was during these times that the founders, Page and Brin, found a common ground despite of starting on the improper foot. The Google Project started out as “Back rub”, a system advantageous of analyzing back links that point to a positive website. Instead of spending thousands of dollars, the founders created a current kind of server environment that utilized low-end personal computers from the computer Science department’s loading docks. Their success resulted into a buzz in the university, allowing them to gain fame out of their new search technology.

1998

The pair decided to cash in on their technology by purchasing a cheap/bargained terabyte of disks so they can build their hold computer housings in Page’s room. This became Google’s first data center. They also set up an office and started looking (and calling) potential buyers and partners to finally license their technology, to no avail; nobody was interested. This is when the pair decided to take matters on their own hands by looking for an investing angel whom they can borrow cash from. They found one in Andy Bechtolsheim, one Sun Microsystems’ founders.

Bechtolsheim believed in Google’s potential that he eventually wrote off a check for 100,000 USD without even seeing the whole demo yet. However, Page and Brin’s total initial investment was almost 1M USD, with befriend from friends, relatives and acquaintances. Finally, after incorporating Google, its doors were opened in Menlo Park, California. Google.com started with 10,000 search queries daily until the press took notice of its technology and relevant search results. This brought Google in the pages of USA Today and Le Monde. If this isn’t enough, it was December of the same year that PC Magazine featured Google as one of its 1998 Top 100 Sites and Search Engines.

1999

Google moved to a bigger office at University Avenue in Paolo Alto, tripled its employees and answered 500,000 queries daily. Red Hat was among Google’s first advertisers and commercial search customers. On June 7, 1999, two leading companies in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers funded Google with 25M USD for enhancements and technology advancements. It was during these times that Google was filled in with important and knowledgeable people from the computer and technology industry. This time, searches reached almost 3 million daily. Recognitions flew in including Time Magazine’s renowned 1999 Top Ten Best Cybertech List.

2000

Removing “beta” from its name, Google was known as the Googleplex. It was only during this time that a company culture evolved. Google management endeavored to make the office the best working environment ever by providing not only the best machines to their employees but also the best furniture, the best free health products and the best informal and comfortable office which then resulted to an accelerated exchange of ideas. New technologies developed during the year include: Google directory, Wireless Search ability, AdWords, Google Toolbar and 10 different language versions of the state. With its billion-page index, and its important partnership with Yahoo, Google officially became the world’s biggest and most important search engine.

2001

The birth of Google Zeitgeist which captured top-trending searches through its real-time window into the joint notice. This is when Google found what other search engines didn’t: profit. Included in this year’s achievements are its agreement with Lycos Korea, partnership with UOL (Universo Online), opening of new sales offices in Hamburg and Tokyo, expansion to 26 languages, launching of Google Image search and Google Catalog search. It was also on this year that Google made a leap, an important milestone came, Google reached 3 billion searchable web information.

2002

Google introduced its plug and play solution Google Search Appliance which comes in a bright yellow box. This “Google in a box” allows users to crawl company intra-nets, university networks and e-commerce sites in no time. This and other innovations resulted to Google achieving the top honors for Best Image Search Engine, Outstanding Search Service, Most Webmaster Salubrious Search Engine, Best Search Feature and Best Design. Among its innovations for this year are as follows: Web API, launching of Adwords, Google Compute, Google Labs, Google Sets, Google News, and Froogle, and its partnership with America Online (AOL),

2003-2004

Google ultimately became the Blogger’s residence address. Google AdSense was also born along with the Google Deskbar and the enhancement of the Google Toolbar, featuring a pop-up blocker and a form filler. In 2004, search index was up to 6 Billion items, making Google the most important Internet discovery ever. Thus, Local Search was born, along with Personalized Search on Google Labs and the launching of its own web-based mail service: Gmail. Google SMS was also launched on 2004, with Google Groups and Google Print tagging along.

2005

A new appliance was launched for shrimp and medium-sized business, instead of yellow, Google used blue, and thus the blue Google Mini was born. This appliance is only available in the newly build Google Store. Innovations for this year include: Google Video, Google Maps, My Search history, Google Web Accelerator, Google Blog, Adsense for Feeds, Personalized homepage, Google Sitemaps, Google Earth, its own Chinese R&D center, Google Talk, Google Blog Search, Google Local Service via Mobile Phones, Google Reader, Google Horrible, Google Analytics, Google Book Search, Music Search and its refined agreement with AOL. This is also a year of human resource growth for Google as it reached 4,989 full time employees.

2006

The year started with a bang for Google with a new Google Video Player and Google Pack. It was also this year that Google Chat was released with Page Creator, Google Finance, along with its Moon and Mars projects in cooperation with NASA Ames Research Center. They also released Google Calendar, U.S. Government Search, Google Checkout, the largest WIFI Network for free, Google Apps for Domain, Google Apps for Education, Google Custom Search Engine, Google Website Optimizer, Sitemaps for Google News, Google Docs&Spreadsheets, an advertising partnership with eBay, a YouTube and Jotspot acquisition, a strategic cooperation with Intuit, a toolbar sharing contract with Adobe and Google Earth in Japanese version. This is also the year for Google’s mobile endeavors with Google News for mobile, Mobile Ads Pilot in Japan, Google Maps for Mobile and Gmail for mobile.

2007

2007 was the year for a partnership with China Mobile, collaboration with Samsung, partnerships with universities in Kenya and Rwanda, Feedburner and Zenter acquisitions, and YouTube expansion to nine more domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK, translated and localized for each country. This year, Google also launched the following services: Google Apps Premier Edition, Google SketchUp 6, Australia-specific domain for Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, flights SMS, Adscape, Trendalyzer, DoubleClick, more great version of Google Analytics, Google Desktop to Linux, Google Product Search, Google Hot Trends, Climate Savers Computing Initiative, Google Teacher Academy in Santa Monica and Google Gadget Ventures.

Google’s Project Management

Google maintains a philosophy in managing each of its project, as well as the Google Project as whole, that is — Never settle for the best. The Google management believes far-reaching vision and constant innovation are very important factors for a successful project management. Thus, the company lives on the following pillars of project management:

* Focus on the user and everything else will follow
* Do things one at a time and do them really really well
* Fast is always better than slow
* Democracy and freedom on the web has its advantages
* Always sitting at your desk will not really necessarily give you the answer
* Money comes even without doing something evil
* More information is always available out there
* The need for information traverses all kinds of borders
* Seriousness cannot be measured with a suit and tie
* Being great is not good enough

Finding an article which talks about Google’s project management internal tools is as difficult as finding a needle in the haystack. However a short insight leaked out and was made available on the net. Everyone who read the minute excerpt found Google’s project management tools really impressive. This is how they do it:

Every week, each of the company’s technologists receives an automatically generated electronic mail containing a message that asks what the recipient’s activities were in the current week along with its planned activities for the incoming week. This domestic project management system temporarily saves the answer it gets, perform analysis and extract essential information for follow-up. Thus, if we accomplish a scenario, the following week, the system will ask the question, “Last week, you said you’ll have these ten things done, did you? ”

Google also has a more dilapidated project tracking system that uses a form to make technologists and project leaders to key-in data in different fields and check-boxes, thus giving the computer a more structured data to process. To build things easier for the employees however, they will be asked to submit their reports as an unstructured electronic mail. The project tracking system will then work to analyze and understand e-mail contents in the same manner that Google’s search engine pulls out context and meaning from several web pages. All project tracking reports go into a searchable database so that managers can see any progress of various efforts. Employees in different offices and even in different countries, can even access the database so find other projects that might be applicable to their own.

Google is definitely not using Outlook. Its employees are enjoying the same technology that the users are enjoying through its advanced search engine.

Google’s Budget

It was made apparent on the discussion of the company’s milestone that the founders of Google did everything they can to do on cash and utilize every available resource before the company was incorporated. Unfortunately, exact figures and amounts of every endeavor are not revealed in the net. A few estimates are then made to provide readers an overview of how much the project really costs.

Review of Project Costs

First, Page and Brin started under the premise of a school project. It’s nothing costly really, every research made is even charged on personal expenses since they have their own PCs and may utilize Stanford’s laboratory and library for supplement. They even used and borrowed low-cost computers from the university to save money in establishing their test server environment. But when the system became operational, that’s when they looked for someone who can fund the project for it to be formally launched and published on the pick up. They came up with a $100,000, a check which stayed on Page’s desk for weeks because it was issued to Google Inc. (a non-existing company yet). Thus, Page and Brin were forced to raise funds to be weak to finally turn the school project into a corporate project. After raising (by borrowing from friends, relatives and acquaintances) an amount close to $1 Million, Google Inc. was born. This initial investment was all borrowed money, but after Google’s huge success, every penny was paid, including interest.

Problems Faced

Though there are numerous problems and issues that Google faced on its almost one decade of operations in the world wide web, the three generally considered noisiest issues will be addressed in our discussion.

1. Google on Copyright

Huge problems loom on Google’s description of its Library Project. Others comment that Google is ruling over the copyright law’s matter of consent that is very well-known to publishers. This project was established for Google to achieve its goal of scanning every material, may it be copyrighted or public domain, from every cooperating library in the world so that the site won’t miss a single “hit” or search item returned. The idea is to scan the whole copyrighted material and then expose snippets of scanned material in response to a search, with or without the consent of the rights holder. Thus, many are awaiting a copyright decision that will address search engines such as Google in voluntary and not compulsory terms.

2. Google as Expansive Brother

Google was “nominated” for a Big Brother award by various organizations. This is due to Google’s privacy issues as follows:

* Google was the first and the leading search engine that uses a cookie that will expire in 2038, some kind of immortality. How can a cookie be harmful? Google’s cookie places a unique identification number on the user’s hard disk which Google may consume in its discretion.

* Google records everything, for all user searches, from the cookie ID, the IP address, the time and date, search terms, and the browser configuration.

* Google keeps have of all data indefinitely because it has no clear data retention policy. Google is able to access all user information that they glean and save in a click of a button. Google doesn’t even have a concrete reason why they are doing such.

* Google has an ex-spy on its payroll, someone who passe to work for the National Security Agency.

* Google’s has a spy-ware for a toolbar which also reads the user’s cookies and system settings. Installing the toolbar could mean that Google essentially has complete access to the user’s hard disk every time a connection to Google is made.

3. Google and its Creepy Gmail

* Gmail is almost entirely immortal and it even offers more storage for the user’s email than other service providers. This is to encourage users not to delete anything. However, even if users delete emails, Google smooth admits storing them internally, eternally keeping information indefinitely. Google may even opt to give this information to whomever they wish.

* If Google builds (or if it already have one) a database of keywords that are associated with all email addresses in its system, the potential for abuse is indeed gigantic. Intelligence agencies would adore to have this and have to play with this information. A diagram that will show social networks of different individuals who are inclined toward the same thoughts could be generated, a rather important data mining for intelligence agencies.

How Problems Were Solved

On the Copyright Issue

Google’s critics believe that Google Book Search has been launched to become substitute for the printed word. On the contrary, Google answered by saying that their goal is to improve access to published/printed materials (books) and not to replace them. Google even claimed working closely with publishers so they can develop advanced tools to sell books on-line.

Google claims not hurting any Copyright law, saying that such law is supposed to give authors and publishers the opportunity show their work, not stop people from finding out that their materials exists. Google helps people find materials believing all the while that it is helping to publish these materials.

Google solved this issue by soliciting statements from known publishers and authors. Google published such statements in their website to prove that they are not breaking any copyright law. Google even provided links to 17 USC 107 (The Fair Use Provisions in U.S. copyright law) and the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center

On the Cookies Lisp

Google answered this issue by justifying that log data analysis is important to help its engineers refine Google’s search quality and even create new services, not for anything else (spooky nor creepy). Google also defended its cookie system by saying that doing such is crucial in the prevention of fraud and abuse. For example, IP addresses must be recorded to protect the user’s system from security risks and attacks. Phishing, scripting attacks and spam can also be avoided with Google’s cookies. Thus, Google is not proposing any change in their cookies despite the many issues that are being thrown to them. To Google, their cookies are harmless and even helpful, why change it?

After considering the several concerns from several organizations, Google announced a new policy: to have its search server logs use a fictitious name after 18 months, rather than the formerly-instituted 24 months. This proceed is to satisfy concerns while still addressing its legitimate interests in innovation, security, and anti-fraud.

On the GMail Issue

To solve this issue, Google opted to display a user’s incoming emails in a box inside an embedded frame which is being served by a separate server as well as in an isolated session. This will prevent the “forward” and “send” buttons within the emails-rendering frame; instead, it will appear in a containing page with the necessary credentials.

SWOT Analysis

See Figure 2

Conclusion

See Figure 3

References

1. On internal Project Management tools at Google – http://techiteasy.org/2006/08/21/on-googles-internal-project-management-tools/

2. Search Biz: Google’s Project Management Tools, Iowa Seeks Microsoft, & More – http://searchengineland.com/080312-174010.php

3. About Google – http://www.google.com.ph/about.html

4. The Birth of Google – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle.html? pg=2&topic=battelle&topic_set=

5. How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows – http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html

6. Google Inc. – http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html? inline=nyt-org

7. Google spins to avoid copyright challenges – http://www.google-watch.org/modify.html

8. And then there were four – http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

9. PageRank: Google’s Original Sin – http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html

10. Google Responds To EU: Cutting Raw Log Retention Time; Reconsidering Cookie Expiration – http://searchengineland.com/070612-041042.php

11. GMail backdoor patched, time to check your filters – http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/? p=554