What is Google?

Hello. My name is Alec Sharratt. I work for Koozai as a Digital Marketing Executive. Today I’m going to be answering the question, “What is Google?” This is a search term we’ve found to be quite common. So we thought we’d give you some insight into who they are, what they do, and then where they come from.

Google are an American multi-national corporation originally founded in 1996, by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their initial aim was to organise the world’s information in such a way as to make it both accessible and useful to everyone trying to use it. There is also the sub-aim of not being evil. This is reflected by the fact that they have the words, “Do not be evil,” printed on their office wall. It’s also shown in the fairness and the way that they lay out the search results with organic listings occupying the bulk of the page and coloured backgrounds differentiating paid adverts from the organic listings.

Google originally were a search engine only. They based everything else they’ve done, all these other offerings, on the success of their search algorithm which was so prevalent and successful it actually created a paradigm shift in the way that all other search engines measure the relevance and authority of a site. This has gone from originally keywords density and keyword focused relevance on a page to a much more complex relationship between all the different websites, linking to each other, one promoting another and so forth. This gave birth to the concept of PageRank, which is a trademark term by Google, but similar concepts exist in all other search algorithms nowadays and are a very good measure of a website’s authority.

So to give you a few stats around Google, they’re a massive company with over a billion searches performed internationally every day and 24 petabytes of information generated by users on a daily basis as well, which is about 24,000 terabytes a day. They have an estimated 1,000,000 servers internationally in different data centres to process, store, and mange this information. They’re a massive company, so going from two people creating an algorithm in 1996 to in 2010 having revenues of $30 billion US and total company assets around $60 billion.

But with fame and infamy come criticism, and over the recent years they have come under fire for a number of different areas of complaints, such as censorship, copyrights, and privacy being the most important to many of their users. This is largely because of the lack of privacy provided by Gmail and because of the behavioural advertising that is integrated into the AdWords system and the way in which they advertise to people. But they’ve also come up against other corporate giants such as Microsoft in very recent times and Apple as well.

I think the best measure of their success in terms of their permeation of modern culture is really in the fact that they’re changed the meaning of the word google. They’ve changed it from its original mathematical definition of 100 over 1 or 1 with 100 zeroes after it to, in many cases, a verb. I’m sure many people have heard the phrase “google it” as a way of referring to searching for something on the Internet or finding something out. I think this really shows their level of prevalence in our modern society and culture.

So that’s Google in a nutshell for you. My name is Alec Sharratt. If you’d like to see any more of my videos, you can do so on our Koozai channel on YouTube. You can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or you can visit our website at www.koozai.com. Thanks for your time. Goodbye.