Unit 60
What Do You Know about Google?
Just a few years back, the word Google existed as the name of a cartoon character (Barney Google) and possibly among the random phonemes mumbled by toddlers. Today, one would be hard-pressed to find a person who hasn't heard of the search engine that bears this name. The word Google is a variant on the Google (10^100), a term coined by the 9-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, who asked him to think of a name for a very large number. The word Googolplex is the numeral that represents 10^googol. And perhaps not oddly, the word Googleplex is also now in play.
Within a few short years Google has become the top search engine in the world and has earned the most esteemed privilege in contemporary pop culture -- it has became a verb. ("I googled you and found out you were lying to me about your Ph.D. And you have a prison record!"). It is interesting to note that Google is fighting in the courts to keep its name out of the dictionary, much as Xerox fights to keep its name from being used as an equivalent to photocopying. The legal concept in a nutshell: As the name becomes more commonly used, it becomes less of a brand, detracting from its proprietary nature. Google has also spawned products, projects concepts, and imitations galore. It is safe to say that Google is not just an Internet search engine, but has become something of a phenomenon.
Google stores a copy of every web page, except images, that it finds while spidering the web. Google does ALL this magic with just cheap PC servers. Google's data centers include a lot of the same equipment and software found in traditional IT data centers. For example, Google has a supercomputer based on hundreds of Intel's advanced 64-bit Itanium microprocessors.
Google sees itself as a hard-core engineer culture that has virtually no managerial controls. Engineers work in teams but no one is there to control or set their projects. There is no management of the engineers. Google publishes pages of content and sells ads on those pages. That's very traditional newspaper or magazine business model, except that Google uses machines to harvest and publish the content instead of using editors, reporters, copy editors, etc. Google News is an engineering solution. Advertising is also harvested by machines, running a simple auction system between advertisers. And the distribution channel is the global computer network of the Internet. It's a very efficient business process, but it is a media business process.
Yahoo, however, clearly thinks of itself as a media company. It is full of media professionals, and the business is handled by people who know how to run a large media company. Yet at Google, there NO media professionals! They've done well so far, no one would disagree, but can computer engineers grow a media business? This could be Google's Achilles' heel. |