Time comes and time goes. We, human beings are silent audience of this cruelty of the time. We feel it but we can’t do anything about it and won’t able to do anything in near future. For our mental satisfaction we consider this as our fate, which is the most unarguable word ever used in human civilization, sometime implicitly or explicitly. The world or more specifically our human civilization has evolved from stone-age to nano and wireless technology era. The most influential catalyst behind this evolution is the dream of power or more specifically dominance over others. And in this nano and wireless technology era, IT became the most distinguishable factor to manipulate this evolution.

In my point of view is that in this multi dimensional power game, IBM was the major player. In the sixties, seventies and the mid-eighties, IBM was few steps ahead of all other IT companies. Then Microsoft came into the picture, in late eighties, to join this extra ordinary league. It’s achievements are unquestionable though it’s efforts in manipulation of the IT stream were undone to an extent by the open source movement. Still the fact remains that more than 90% of world’s computers run on Microsoft products, more specifically Windows (9X to latest the Vista) operating system. Strategically Microsoft made some amendments to their policies and strategies, to adapt to the current scenario such as allowing compatibility with Linux, especially in networking and server based operations.

In all this, evolution of Google is compared to phoenix’s. Google focused on the search engine initially which simply acted as a medium between the user and the resources which are available on the internet. Here I want to emphasize on word ‘resources’. Check out the following statistics:

1. Web pages in the world, August 2005: 19.2 billion pages were indexed by Yahoo as of August 2005.
2. Web sites in the world, August 2005: 70,392,567 web sites were indexed by Netcraft as of August 2005.
3. Web pages per web site: 273 (rounding to the nearest whole number).
4. Web pages in the world, February 2007: multiplying our estimate of the number of web pages per web site by Netcraft's February 2007 count of web

[source:http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html]

We can now imagine the volume of information scattered all over the internet (WWW). Most of the information not available on the internet (though the possibility is very minimal) is related to incidents which are not reported or happened a long time ago. There's a particular logic behind this. These days, whatever happens in the world, from any local car accident, publishing of a small article in local newspaper, publishing of a scholarly book to a nuclear accident-it has to be written or processed on a computer and that information will be published on that particular newspaper's or Publishing Company’s website. This means that the particular information will be available on the net anyhow. Before the dotcom boom, the computer boom or more specifically the publishing boom everything was done manually. Now all this information is fed into internet (WWW). We hope that all the information and incidents not fed into the internet till now will be done completely by 2015. Now, here search engines play an important role of finding out the specific information from this huge amount of data. Let us see the current scenario on search engines market share.

Market Share Of Searches: August 2006:

The chart below shows percentage of searches by US web surfers in August 2006, performed at a particular web site or a network of web sites:

It shows how effective the Google search engine is. The most interesting thing is that other search engines also use Google for their searches. From this we can assume how efficient Google as a search engine is. I will mention my own personal experience with these search engines. I typed ‘Sangshay Mohanta’ in the search bar and only Google gave me the right answer referring some 10/12 websites. Chacha referred me to two websites (and sometimes no result at all!!) and the remaining search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Acoona, Altavista, Ask.com, AOL, Lycos, Inktomi, Overture, Looksmart - were not able to produce a single result. You can try it out by yourself as an experiment with any odd word or a phrase or topics. Now when we take any popular topic, Google produces more results than any other search engine. In this case yahoo is not far behind Google. If you think about the speed (time search engine takes to fetch data from www) then Google is simply incomparable. For searching data Google use PageRank algorithm. It ranks a particular page according to the relevancy of the data. And this page rank (indexing) of the web page changes (reindexing) after one month. To rank a page it examines it from the title to the footer, along with the content and saves them meticulously.

Now come to the point of cookies. Cookie a small file, is generated on the user's side. If you are worried about your privacy while surfing the internet then there are plenty of reasons to be scared of Google (yes, you read it there right!). While we are searching something on the internet using Google or any other Google product like specific topic wise service-iGoogle, social networking site - Orkut, video sharing site - YouTube, pay per click site-Google AdSense or some others that I don’t know (and some are in pipeline) it saves your preference, IP address, search query and cookie details and uses them next time you search. Now think about this: Google knows you, your reference, your choice, your bank account number, your social security number - I mean everything. If you are a netizen (if you are not then you are definitely living in eighteen century or a more ancient time!).Protests from various privacy groups and a law suit filed by European Union on the issue of privacy made Google modify its privacy policy. Earlier the cookies were set to expire on 2038 but now they have changed it to after 2 years the cookie was created. Without any automatic renewal of account it will be expire. But I think this will not change the whole scenario. This is like shifting to another strategy without hampering the previous goal(s). It’s the loophole of judiciary and Google is using it very smartly.

Now let us focus on another unique feature of Google - Google translation. Data available on the internet is in different languages. If you are not able to access these data then Google is there with a helping hand. Google will help you translate from any premier language to another premier language. For this use Google toolbar and the problem is solved within a second! In a research paper (Information is Power: Toward intelligent Tools for Information Access and Evaluation) I found this very surprising information-
"Given the general unavailability of most documents on the internet in only one language and the desirability of ultimately having most documents available in a set of, say, 100 languages, the translation task is a formidable one: roughly 800 billion separate translations to make the pages searched by Google as of September 2006 accessible to the speakers of all of those languages"

Another admirable product from Google is Google earth. You can view every possible area of our mother earth using Google earth. Some of the sensitive sites and locations are masked after receiving complaints from the authorities on security issues. Other than that whatever else Google Earth provides is really amazing. This means that the information Google has is more powerful than some of the developed countries. And it's more than enough to give them sleepless nights!

In this era of marketing, customer is the king. If you don’t have any doubt on that then think about the volume of information Google gathers (this will now be affected by the current strategy shift which I discussed earlier) by using cookies (PREF cookies) or other techniques. They can easily manipulate any industry by using this information. Another pay per click initiative by Google is Google Adsense. This is a win - win situation for Google as well as for the users, bloggers and small website owners. Therefore, the revenues! (I can remember a book named "You are OK, I am OK").

In a current survey (source: www. search engineland.com) for the most popular internet brand, Google ranked at top with 37% votes followed by Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Microsoft (including MSN), AOL, Apple and others. As a younger brand MySpace did reasonably well and more interestingly lion’s share of MySpace votes came from young users. Certainly this is a alarming sign for Google. Along with that, people have started comparing MySpace to Google and named it as the new Google. Another organization I have to mention as a competitor of Google is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has already sidelined big brother Microsoft's Encarta in the encyclopedia section. Recently, Wikipedia's owner announced that he would also enter the search engine industry (actually already they are in but not completely). Therefore tie your seat belts to watch the race amongst the big brothers of IT for the hot seat.

Established in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is the top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program is suitable for businesses of all sizes. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia and has a market capitalization of 164.43 Billion [526.79 +1.64 (0.31%) 05 September 2007 at 12:39PM PT].
Currently Google is trying to enter the telecom domain which is the nerve of IT. This is clearly a strategic expansion of Google which will forward its profile one step ahead. To keep the brand image cool and clean Google’s privacy policy should be more transparent and has to earn it’s user’s confidence, regarding their privacy and confidentiality. I hope the brand image will touch its height when they will release their operating system GooOS [Google Operating System]. More importantly they have to give full support to the open source movement where I think future of IT lies. If Google can keep up the pace with its current growth strategically and financially then within couple of years it will lead the extraordinary league of IT – I mean, on its way to become an IT czar.

References

1. Learn Google By Michael Busby, Wordware Publishing, Inc.
2. Google Hacking for Penetration tester By Johnny Long
3. Google File System By Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff and Shun-Tak Leung
4. Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It works By Ian Rogers
5. Modern Information Retrieval By Amit Singhal
6. Information is Power: Toward Intelligent Tools for Information Access and Evaluation By Michael Gasser, Stephen Hockema and Mathew Kane
7. www.searchenginewatch.com
8. www.googleblog.blogspot.com
9. www.google-watch.org
10. www.boutell.com
11. www.submitwebsite.com
12. www.1cog.com
13. www.neilson-netratings.com
14. www.robcasky.com
15. www.google.com/about.htm

Author: Sangshay K. Mohanta - skmohanta@gmail.com