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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.