Google - A Saga of Innovation

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Authors: S.Ramakrishna & Sanjib Dutta,
Research Associate, Senior Faculty Member,
ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).

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Google has evolved from a small search company over the web into the world's no.1 search engine and is now on the verge of scaling even more heights with its email service.

Google, the world's most popular search engine, is scaling new heights these days. Born out of a project work carried out by Larry Page (Page) and Sergey Brin (Brin), both Stanford dropouts, Google has come a long way; from a small information search technology on the web to the world's most popular and mostly referred search engine.

Google search is an easy-to-use service which gives the results of a query in a fraction of a second. Millions of browsers prefer Google over search engines such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Netscape and Lycos. Not only does Google rank much higher than other search engines in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, but it also scores over others in terms of layout due to its uncluttered look (Exhibit I gives a comparison of popular search engines).

Google searched more than three billion web pages and processed more than 200 million search requests every day. The search engine could search for every possible file type on the World Wide Web, in 36 languages and provided interface in 86 languages.

Exhibit I
A Comparison of Various Search Engines

Search Engine	Boolean	Default	Proximity	Truncation	Case	Fields	Limits	Stop	Sorting
Google	-, OR	and	Phrase	No, but stemming word in phrase	No	intitle inurl, inurl, link, site more	Language, file, type, date domain	Varies, + searches	Relevance, Site
Yahoo!	And or	and	Phrase	No	No	intitle, url site, inurl link, more	Language, file, type, date domain	Very few	Relevance, Site
Ask Jeeves/ Teoma	-, OR	and	Phrase	No	No	intitle, inurl	Language, site, date	Yes, + searches	Relevance, metasites
MSN Search	And, OR, Not, (), -	and	Phrase	No	No	link site, locurl	Language, site	Varies, + searches	Relevance, site, sliders
WiseNut	– only	and	Phrase	No	No	No	Language	Yes, + searches	Relevance, site
Gigablast	AND, OR, And NOT, ( ), +, –	and	Phrase	No	No	title, site, ip	Domain, type	Varies, + searches	Relevance
Exalead	AND, OR, NOT ( ), –	and	Phrase Near	Yes	No	title	Language, file type, date	Varies, + searches	Relevance, date

Adapted from www.ucalgary.ca/library/netsearch/compchart.html.

Since its inception, Google has been successful in giving its competitors a run for their money. In a short span of time, Google has become the best search engine by eating into the market share of Yahoo and other players. Its innovative strategy to generate revenue by placing advertisements on sites which contain information related to those ads has indeed made Google highly profitable. As if that was not enough; a year ago, Google surprised everyone by announcing the launch of Gmail, its email service, with a massive storage space of 1GB. Gmail, which was launched on 1st April 2004, was quite successful in attracting users of Yahoo and Hotmail.

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