Just finished this book… check out it’s website!
Google was born from the word Googol - a very large number. Google was born in in 1998 by a couple of Stanford university PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page and today the word Google has become a verb to mean internet search.
I learnt about pageRank Search method, Gmail controversy about privacy invasion, Google News, Froogle, AdSense, Google Doodles, Culture as a university, SafeSearch Filter and GLAT !!
Google is truly a dynamic culture company headed by 2 humble Google guys with wild ideas. And they have an awesome mantra: Don’t be Evil! Exactly what we mean by that? Well, they say whatever Sergey says is evil, it’s evil :P
Talk about the company culture… or rather the Googleplex university culture!!
There was electricity in the air. Everyone was on fire. As soon as you walked in, you were hit with this onslaught of color. Vibrant colours in the lobby, hues of primary colours, lava lamps, people riding around on scooters in the hallways, things you didn’t see anywhere else. People had their dogs to work. You walked in and looked around and people wondered, “what kind of place is this?” It was like an extension of Stanford in a lot of ways. Creativity was not squelched. We did a lot of creative things for food service…
How does Google create the tremendous revenue?
Still, millions who loved the Search engine continued to have a hard time understainding how Google made money, since they could use it for free. Many failed to grasp the difference between free search results and the ads that appeared alongside them. … Like so much about Google, it came down to sheer math. At the scale at which Google operated, serving results for hundreds of millions of searched each day, all it took was one out of every ten or fifteen searchers to click on an ad - at, say an average price of 50 cents for the click - for the company to reach the sort of quaterly earnings it achieved in 2004.
Google’s management and financial model by Schmidt…
Schmidt explained they were allocated 70/20/10. By that, he meant that 70 percent was put into core search and advertising, 20% was put into adjacent products and 10% was invested in totally new ideas, the vision of things to come. “You have to work on your core business because that is the thing that brings in the cash flow, the customers, the business,” he said. As for the 10%, “We have a very sipohisticated set of product managers and technology leaders who understand how to take some of these brilliant ideas and turn them into businesses.”