Even though this my blog is about Google SEO, I want you to have a brief overview of what Google is, its importance in the present economy, its strengths, and its weaknesses. Having a good overview on how this company works will help you understand in a better way who this giant company is and why Google instead of others.
Google is an American company based in California. It is mainly known as a search engine.
Even though the company has become famous as a search engine, and most of its revenue comes from advertising because of this, it has diversified into a number of areas such as cloud computing, software and hardware.
The company has recently created its first mobile hardware device, this Google phone is called Pixel.
The unit of the company based on cloud is called Google Cloud, it includes things like G-Suite, the company’s productivity apps like Google Drive and Gmail.
Google is the main subsidiary of Alphabet and protects its interests on the Internet. Following the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, and Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet.
Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It is the top search engine in the world, a position that has generated concern and criticism on the power it has to influence the flow of information you can find online.
Google is so famous that the word "Google" can also be used as a verb, so that when someone is looking for something on Google, they can say they "Googled" for it.
At this point, the question you’re asking isn’t “what is Google?” but “what does Google mean?” That’s why I want to talk about how Google got its name. You know, that stupid made-up word that has now taken its deserved space in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Back sometime in the late ’90s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were two graduate students at the University of Stanford. They were working on a search engine whose name would be BackRub, because their search engine searched through backlinks.
Fortunately, they realized early on that BackRub would be one of the worst tech company names in the history of companies in general and tech companies, so they started to search for something a little more cool.
During yet another name brainstorming session, the word “googolplex” was suggested by one of their friends, Sean, a fellow graduate student.
Yes, when you ask the question, “what does Google mean?” it reveals that Google is a misspelling of a real-life mathematical term, googol.
Googolplex is the official name used for the number: 10 to the power of googol. Googol is the name mathematicians use to reference 10 to the power of 100, or:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s 1 plus 100 zeros.
The name googolplex and googol were originally coined by the nephew of Edward Kasner (an important American mathematician) Milton Sirotta. As Sirotta said, googolplex was shorthand for a number so large that you would have to write it as “one, followed by too many zeroes that will get you tired.” Of course, his uncle Edward found this definition to not be specific because after all it is true that “not all the people get tired at the same time and for example it would never have happened to the famous boxer Primo Carnera to be a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, because he simply had more endurance and could write for longer!” So googolplex has recieved the official definition of being 10 to the power of googol or, if you prefer, 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 100.
As Sean suggested googolplex, Larry said that he preferred the other word googol, and felt like the term in general was a great match for what they were trying to create: index an incredible number of web pages on the Internet.
Sean didn't realize googol was spelled with an “ol” at the end, so he unknowingly searched on the Internet to see if the domain name “google.com” was available.
Larry liked the new term Sean had accidentally invented, and voila! Google was finally named. And now you can answer the next time you hear someone else wondering, “what does Google mean?”.
Alphabet Inc. business overview from the company’s financial report:
“Alphabet is a collection of companies and Google, of course, is the main one. It also includes other businesses that are generally pretty far afield from our main Internet products such as CapitalG, GV, Calico, Nest, Access, Waymo, X, and Verily. Our Alphabet structure is about helping each of our businesses prosper through strong independence and leaders.
Google's core products such as Android, Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Play each have over one billion active users every month. But most important, we strongly believe we are just beginning to scratch the surface. Our future vision is to be a place of incredible innovation and creativity that uses our technical expertise to face up to big problems.
We generate our revenues primarily by delivering both performance brand advertising and advertising.
Across the company, artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly driving many of our latest innovations. Considering that our investments in machine learning in Google over a decade have enabled us to build products that are more useful and smarter - it's what lets you use your voice to ask the Google Assistant to translate the web from one language to another, for information, to search for people and events in Google Photos, and to see YouTube recommendations.
We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies looking to connect people with information online and deliver relevant advertising to them. We face competition from:
- General purpose search engines and information services, such as Microsoft's Bing, Seznam, Baidu, Yandex, Verizon's Yahoo, and Naver.
- Vertical search engines and E-Commerce websites, such as eBay and Amazon (E-Commerce), WebMD (health queries), Kayak (travel queries), and LinkedIn (job queries).
- Social networks, such as SnapChat, Twitter, and Facebook. Some users increasingly rely on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines.
- Providers of digital video services, such as Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.
- Providers of enterprise cloud services, including Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft.
- Digital assistant providers, such as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.”
Google’s strengths
Dominance in web search, online advertising, video content sharing, browser usage, mobile OS, and many other markets
Alphabet’s Google is an Internet company that primarily competes in the web search and online advertising markets. However, the company’s product portfolio is very diverse and includes both related and unrelated software and hardware services and products. Google dominates most of the markets it operates within, including:
Web search
Google Search is the most famous company’s search engine that people use to find information online. It’s the most used search engine in the world with a 92.6% share of the mobile segment and 73.63% desktop market share as of March 2018.
Google’s search engine domination is especially prominent in Europe with the company having more than 90% market share in both the mobile and desktop market segments.
Online advertising
Google’s main source of revenue is its advertising business. In 2017, Google earned US$95.375 billion from advertising or 87% of Google’s total revenue and 86% of the total Alphabets’ revenue.
According to the market research company eMarketer, Google earned more than 43% of the whole United States digital advertising revenue in 2017, twice as much as Facebook, their next largest earner. Worldwide, Google earned more than 33% of the digital advertising revenue in 2016.
The company dominates the digital advertising market through many different channels, including its own AdWords advertising program, AdSense, the Android OS, and YouTube.
Being the first in the online advertising market Google can understand more than anyone current advertising trends, enhance their related services by improving targeted advertisements, and collect an incredible amount of information about online users’ shopping habits.
Android mobile operating system
Google’s recent increase in its advertising and other revenue sources has been fuelled by the huge adoption of its Android mobile OS.
Android OS is the number one mobile operating system in the world and it’s being used by some of the largest smartphone companies such as Xiaomi, Samsung, OPPO, Huawei, LG, Huawei and Lenovo. In 2018 April, Google’s Android had 73.2% of the worldwide smartphone operating system market share.
The growing market share of Android has led to an increase in the popularity of other Google products such as the Chrome browser, Google Search, Google Play and Google Play Music, further strengthening the company's position in these markets.
The question now is, how does Google’s leadership status in these markets help the company to gain a strong competitive advantage?
Massive amount of information
Google receives an enormous amount of information about its users and their habits through Google Analytics, Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, Android OS and its other products and services. This information provides Google with an important competitive advantage.
Google can target advertisements or tailor its products to user needs better than any competitor because it has smarter algorithms and a lot more information about its users.
Increase brand awareness
Market leadership gives Google greater attention, visibility and greater user engagement through brand awareness.
Power over customers, competitors and suppliers. To some extent, Google can use its dominant market share as a source of power over its customers, competitors and suppliers.
Excellent extraction capabilities
Since 2013, Alphabet (Google through 2015) has taken over 118 companies. From 2013 to 2017, the company made an average of 1.6 purchases per month, one of the highest asset acquisition rates in the world.
Acquisitions are a key strategy for gaining Alphabet's competitive advantage.
By acquiring other companies, Alphabet acquires new knowledge, technologies, patents and improves its products and services, which allows the company to grow faster with less effort. A company often buys finished products that grow into successful companies like YouTube.
Alphabet is like many other tech companies in the sense that without such acquisitions we would have to invest heavily in research and development to improve our products or create new ones. Alphabet has demonstrated its capabilities in the field of successful mergers, acquisitions and integration of companies into the company.
Wide market share
In October 2019, Google ranked # 1 among the most visited cross-platform web properties in the US with nearly 259 million unique US visitors and 62.5% market share among the top search engine providers US. The market capitalization of parent company Alphabet as of September 2019 is valued at $ 825 billion.
Invincibility
Until now, no competitor has managed to challenge their position, let alone achieve their market share in search engines. Yes, we all know that Google is dominant in the search field. But at the same time, the internet is also a very big place, and building a decent search algorithm couldn't be that hard, right?
This week's chart is a little confusing, as it shows that Google is even more dominant than you might think. Of all the features of Google and its subsidiary search giant YouTube, over 90% of all internet searches are done through the company.
Largest traffic generator
Google generates more than 1.2 billion visits each month. It is the largest traffic generator and clearly has an advantage over competitors such as Yahoo, Baidu and Bing.
According to the market analytics company, which licenses hundreds of millions of users to ClickStream anonymous data, about 64.1% of all web searches go through Google’s main feature.
But that’s just the beginning, as this number doesn’t include other Google features like image search or Google Maps, or features like YouTube. Together, Google has an impressive 90.8 percent market share of web, mobile, and app searches, though it should be noted that the said source does not yet contain extensive iPhone data.
High revenue
Google’s revenue in the first quarter of 2020 was $ 40.88 billion, down $ 45.6 billion from the previous quarter.
In 2019, Google generated most of Alphabet's core revenue with just $ 112.25 billion in ad revenue on Google sites. Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising through Google's proprietary and curated properties such as Google Maps, Google Search and more.
Revenue generated by sites that are members of the Google Network includes revenue from ads served through advertising programs such as AdSearch for AdSense. Other revenues include digital content products and applications sold through Google's digital content delivery platform, as well as hardware, including smartphones and Chromecast devices. The digital content platform Google Play is increasingly contributing to Google's expansion, especially with the increase in smartphone sales and the market share of Google Android. Geographically, most of Google's revenue comes from individual countries in the United States and 32% of its revenue is generated in the EMEA region.
Flexibility
Google has successfully adapted mobile and Android technologies, allowing them to compete directly with Apple's iPhone. Android has evolved over the years and has quickly become the dominant mobile platform around the world. According to Statista Android, it had owned more than 74% of the global mobile operating system market share since December 2019.
While most of us know exactly what Android is and how to use it, there are still a lot of people unfamiliar with Google’s mobile operating system who eventually drop or switch off that old-fashioned cell phone. iPhone or any other Android competitor. Are you among the latest in Android? This article is just for you.
Android is not a phone or an app, but an operating system based on the Linux kernel. You have no idea what this is? In its simplest definition, Linux is the operating system most commonly found in servers and desktops. Due to many changes under the hood, Android is not just a version of Linux, but it is connected.
Android is an operating system designed with mobile devices in mind, where the features and applications of your phone are. Everything you see on the device screen is part of the operating system. When you receive a call, text message, or e-mail, the operating system processes this information and converts it into a readable format.
Google’s weaknesses
Privacy Policy
Many experts have accused Google of relying too much on privacy, especially by hiding information about algorithms. The company has since taken steps to address the allegations.
The term “invasion of privacy” distracts us from understanding important issues.
Infringement of privacy is often a central issue where consumers need protection from technology companies. Apple has placed it as the basis for its marketing.
Companies collect information about you when you use their services. You may be surprised how many information technology companies monitor, but this is nothing new - companies have been monitoring data about you for a long time.
You may be surprised to learn what conclusions companies can draw from what they know about you. Well, they accept conclusions so well that sometimes you find it scary, and much more terrifying.
As long as a large company like Google keeps your information to themselves and shares it only with you, it is not an invasion of privacy. Privacy only becomes an invasion if you share your personal information with others. Facebook has done this too many times. Google has been reliable so far.
Excessive ads
Google's over-reliance on ads has led to further speculation about the company's future. The company generated 86% of its total revenue from its ad-related projects. Experts believe that a possible change in sales would significantly harm the company.
When Google changed the number of ad units per page in August 2016, the previous "three display units" limit was removed. Some publishers have chosen to interpret this as 'unlimited ads', but as we noted at the time, it's both about requesting a higher share of the valuable content and limiting the number of ad units.
Google engineering seems to be busy and has developed a way to apply this change to scale rules. We've seen evidence of multiple 'low to zero value' and / or 'excessive advertising' warnings and enforcement, so we felt it was a good time to summarize what was expected and share what we have learned about it. and how these rules are implemented.
Boycott of Google and YouTube by major advertisers
Major brands boycotted Google and YouTube when they discovered that their ads were running alongside extremist content full of hatred. This negatively affected Google's image. Companies that boycotted the search engine and video platform included Johnson & Johnson, AT&T and Verizon in the US, L’Oréal, HSBC, RBS, BBC, the Guardian newspaper, British retailer Marks & Spencer, Lloyd’s of London in the UK. Audi, Havas, Tesco, Volkswagen, Sainsbury.
In addition to these stamps, the British government also boycotted it. Google was called before the British Cabinet in 2017 after the government found that its ads - and ads for other taxpayer-funded services such as the Royal Navy and the BBC - were appearing on YouTube alongside extremist videos, which were discovered after an investigation by The Times.
A cabinet spokesman told Business Insider that the meeting was attended by senior Google executives and apologized to senior officials representing the government.
Google has also promised an overhaul of its advertising systems.
A government spokesman said: "It is completely unacceptable for taxpayer-funded ads to run alongside inappropriate Internet content and this message has been communicated very clearly to Google. The government has told Google it expects a plan and timetable for improving the work to prevent government ads from repeating themselves. YouTube ads will remain suspended as long as this work is in progress. "
The UK government has asked Google to return to the government next week to discuss steps it has taken to strengthen its advertising policy.
