The perfect search engine

 

Google is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.  The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American Mathemetician Edward Kasner and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects its mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Google is a public and profitable company headquartered in Mountain view, California focused on search services. It operates web sites at many international domains, with the most trafficked being www.google.com. Google is widely recognized as the "word's best search engine" because it is fast, accurate and easy to use. Google's breakthrough technology and continued innovation serve the company's mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful".

Google understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want. To that end, Google has persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, Google developed its own serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRankTM technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

From the beginning, Google's developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new server setup. Whereas most search engine ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads. Google employed linked PCs to quickly find each query's answer. The innovation paid off faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It's an idea that others have since copied, while Google has continued to refine its back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

The software behind Google's search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRankTM  to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results.

Page Rank Technology : Page Rank performs an objective measurement to the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, Page Rank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. Page Rank A. Page Rank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.

Almost as soon as www.google.com an international Google URL is entered, the homepage appears on the screen. The speed with which the results are returned is even more impressive. Google examines billions of web pages to find the most relevant pages for any query and typically returns those results in less than half a second.

Co-founders Larry Page, president of products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has expanded to more than 4,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced tecnology professionals in the industry. As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google's founders Larry page and Sergey Brin developed the new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. "The company also serves corporate clients, including advertisers, content publishers and site managers with cost-effective advertising and a wide range of revenue generating search services.

Google philosophy is never settle for the best. Given the state of search technology today, that's a far-reaching vision requiring research, developement and innovation to realize. Google is commited to blazing that trail. Though acknowldeged as the world's leading search technology company, Google's goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they're at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok.

Ten things Google has found to be true

1.    Focus on the user and all else will follow :
    From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies calm to put their customers first, few are able to resist the templation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value.

2.    It's best to do one thing realy, really well.
    Google does search. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, they've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service already considered the best on the web at making finding information a fast and seamless expericnce for millions of users.
3.    Fast is better than slow.
    Google believes in instant gratification. Customers want answers and they want them right now. Google may be the only company in the world whose states goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible.
4.    Democracy on the web works.
    Google works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value. Instead of relying on a group of editors of solely on the frequency with which certain terms appear, Google ranks every web page using.
5.    You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
    The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it's through their PDAS, their wireless phones or even their automobiles, people want information to come to them.
6.    You can make money without doing evil.
    Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the state of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web.
7.    There's always more information out there.
    Once Google had indexed more of the HTML pages on the internal than any other search service, their engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databses, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the search billions PDF files.
8.    The need for information crossess all borders.
    Though Google is headquartered in California, their mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so they have offices around the globe. To that end they maintain dozens of internet domains United States. Google search results can be restricted to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user's preference. They also offer a tranlation feature to make content available to users  search in English.
9.    You can be serious without a suit.
    Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that because of the ubiquilous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to their service.
10.    Great just isn't good enough.
    Always deliver more than expected. Google does not accept being the best as an endpoint, but a starting point. Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways. Search works well for properly spelled words, but what about typos ? One engineer saw a need and created a spell checker that seems to read a user's mind.

There's much more to what Google offers, from an amazing spell checker to tool for translating web pages from one language to another or from HTML to a form readable by most mobile devices.
"Google is the realisation of everthing that we thought the internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is Google’s Vice President for Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations. In this role, she is responsible for all of Google’s sales operations in these regions. Sukhinder also oversees the company’s local search and channel initiatives globally. Prior to joining Google, Sukhinder was Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Business Development for Yodlee.com Inc., a leading solutions provider to the global financial services industry. From 1999 to 2003, she was responsible for building Yodlee’s client base and revenues, signing agreements with companies such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Bank of America, Wachovia, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL. For her work at Yodlee and in the industry, Sukhinder has been profiled in publications including Business Week Online, Canada Post, and Innovation Nation, a book profiling Canadian business leaders (Jossey-Bass, 2002).

Prior to joining Yodlee, Sukhinder worked in strategy and business development in Silicon Valley for leading e-commerce providers Amazon.com, and Junglee Corporation, and in New York and London with investment bank Merrill Lynch as well as pay television provider British Sky Broadcasting.

Sukhinder is a graduate of the Ivey School of Business Administration at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. 

As Vice President of European Operations, Nikesh Arora manages and develops Google’s operations in the European market. He is responsible for creating and expanding strategic partnerships in Europe for the benefit of Google’s growing number of users and  advertisers.    

With a background as an analyst, Nikesh’s main areas of focus have been consulting, IT, marketing and finance. Prior to joining Google, he was Chief Marketing Officer and a Member of the Management Board at T-Mobile. While there he spearheaded all product development, terminals, brand and marketing activities of T-Mobile Europe. In 1999 he started working with Deutsche Telekom a nd founded T-Motion PLC, a mobile multimedia subsidiary of T-Mobile International. Prior to joining Deutsche Telekom, Nikesh held management positions at Putnam Investments and Fidelity Investments in Boston.    

Nikesh holds an MS and CFA certification from Boston College, and an MBA from Northeastern University, all of which were awarded with distinction. He has served on the Adjunct Faculty at both Boston College and Northeastern University, developing and teaching courses in business turnarounds, corporate workouts and financial management. In 1989, Nikesh graduated from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, India with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering.