The Key to Success in the Google Search Engine

Introduction

      Google search engine is a web search engine developed by two Stanford computer science graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997 (Google, 2010). According to the Alexa Search Engine rating, Google Search is the most-used web search engine in the world (Wikipedia, 2009).

    In 2008, Google search engine commands 57% of the web search in the United States, followed by yahoo and Microsoft, which accounts for 23% and 11% of the search respectively (Agence France-Presse, 2008). The Google Search has already become an essential part of many people, especially students and researchers’ lives. This short survey tries to discuss the key factors behind the huge success of the Google search engine and the cultural influence brought by it.

    There are several major reasons why Google can beat the numerous competitors and substitutes in the market and become the most popular web search engine in the world. These reasons include aspects of technology, economic, business mode and strategies of the Google Inc.

1.    Technology
    High technology level is an important reason why the Google search engine prevails over its fellow competitors. The formation of the google search engine is based on a research project carried out by its two founders on “BackRub”. “BackRub” is an algorithm that follows the links in a website and analysis all the connections. Later it is modified into the “PageRank” algorithm that generats a popular index based on the quantity and quality of incoming links. (Morrow, B., 2008)

    In fact, the “PageRank” algorithm used by the google search engine till now is the major reason why google search is so successful. The technology reflects the users’ views of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms (Nishith, R., 2009) on June 19, 2009: Google Search – The Success story; url: http://www.pluggd.in/google-search-success-story-297/). The “more important” pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. This improves the accuracy of the result.

    The PageRank is also affected by votes from each page that casts a vote. Some of the pages are consider more important and have higher voting power. This technology allows Google search engine to produced more accurate and relevant search results compared to other search engines such as yahoo and Bang.

    Besides, Google use cheap commodity computer parts while ensuring that they will always have a duplicate in case they fail. Quick swapping and upgrading is allowed by attaching the components to the computer with Velcro rather than screws (Morrow, B., 2008). At present, Google’s search engine and other web applications such as Gmail and Google Doc. are now bundled into the OS on low-cost Linux-based computers (Blankenhorn, 2008). This ensures high performance and fast reaction of the Google search engine with comparatively lower cost.

2.    Economic
    With the success in Google search engine, the Google Inc. has expanded drastically in size in the past few years. Currently, Google Inc. has 20 offices in the United States and international locations in over 30 countries. It offers a localized search engine for more than 115 countries (Google, 2010). The large scale of the Google Inc. allows much capital to be invested on researching new technology and developing new applications. This maintains the advantages of Google in technology level and further expands the market share of the search engine with promotion of side-services such as Google dictionary, weather forecast, applications such as Gmail and Google Documents, and mobile platform such as Android.

    The Economy of Scales of the Google Inc. creates a large entrance barrier for other companies to enter the market of web search engines. It will requires huge capital and human resource to develop a new search engine that can provides better search results at high speed than Google, which has accumulated many years worth of data about the habits of its users. These users are used to using Google search and it is extremely difficult and infeasible to make them change their habit.

    In addition, the long history and good reputations of the mature Google search engine also attracts users from developing countries which can only afford computers recently to consider Google first instead of other competitors in the market. This results in the unstoppable continuous expansion of the Google kingdom in the world.

3.    Human Resource
    Human Resource is one of the greatest assets of the Google Inc. By having top talents from all over the world, Google manage to bring innovations and maintain its leading technology level of its products. This maintains the prevailing position of the Google search engine in the market in terms of technology, creativity and design.

    There are two reasons why the Google Inc. has been so successful in attracting and keeping high quality human resources. Firstly, it has an extremely well working environment. Google Inc. is famous for its fun yet serious working environment and high paid. In fact, Google Inc. was selected as the #1 best place to work for by the Fortune magazine in 2008-2009 (Fortune Magazine (CNN), 2009) and the #4 best place to work for in 2009-2010 (Fortune Magazine (CNN), 2010). The comfortable working environment and the pride as a Google employee enhances the working quality and efficiency of the Google workers. Other than good working environment, Google Inc. also has a unique policy that greatly encourages innovation called the “Innovation Time Off”. This policy allows employees to spend 20% of their working time on projects that are not part of their description. This motivates innovation and diversity of Google. According to Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, half of all new products launched by Google were organized by employees during the Innovation Time Off (Wikipedia, 2010).

    These two factors contribute to the fact that Google is now having the best talents from all aspects in their best shape. This explains why Google search engine is keep improving all the time.

4.    Strategy

    Google’s mantra “Don’t be Evil” explains its major strategy used: respect the users. Unlike many other search engines, which earns profits by mixing search results with sponsored advertisement or clustering loads of advertisement into the front interface, Google keeps its layout clean and simple, and only put advertisement in the form of keywords separated from the search result. These acts, which show respect to users, gain much support and popularity of the search engine.

    Besides, Google is never satisfied with its search engine. We can see that Google is improving their search engine everyday, from accuracy of results, supplementary functions to customized layouts. This maintains the competitiveness of the world’s most popular web search engine.

    Last but not least, designers and maintainers of the Google search are creative and have a great sense of humor. In time of special festivals such as the April Fool’s Day and important days such as the day of birth of some well-known artists, we can always find the funny tricks and creativity of Google in the layouts and words used. We can also find the sense of humor of Google search in its language settings. In fact, we can use google search is some funny language such as Pirate, Hacker and Pig Latin (兒童黑話) (Google, 2010). These efforts of Google seems tiny and insignificant, but in fact it helps the Google search engine to becomes more friendly to the users and emerges Google search with the users’ daily lives.

Limitations and Potential Threats of Google Search Engine

    Although the Google Search engine is undoubtedly very successful at present, there still exist some limitations and potential threats, which will be briefly discussed here.

1.    User experience
    Compared to more localized search engine such as Yahoo HK in Hong Kong and Baidu in Mainland China, the search result of Google is not “local” enough. Therefore, when users want to obtain search results, which are more “local” instead of being international, they prefer the other search engines. A good example is that Baidu, instead of Google, is the most popular search engine in Mainland China.

    Besides, Google directs you directly to a new website on the same page when you click on the results instead of using pop-ups. This is quite inconvenient when you want to view the contents of a lot of results. In this aspect, the Yahoo search engine is more user-friendly.

2.    PageRank used by companies as a tool to earn profits
    The PageRank algorithm of the Google Search Engine uses the method of sorting the search result into different level of importance and relevance based on a voting system of other websites and the quality and quantities of its entire links. Some profit-making companies abuse this system by increasing the rating of their advertisement page by using methods to increase the number of votes. In fact, currently there are companies that exist to serve the purpose to help other companies to get their advertisement page to a higher position in the Google search result.

    The result is that the Google search results are mixed with advertisements and homepage of profit-making companies. This highly violates Google’s motto of “Don’t be Evil” and affects the relevancy of search results. Google will have to put more effort on developing new strategies against these kinds of behavior.

3.    Nature of PageRank
The basic working principle of the PageRank system includes that some webpages that are regarded as “more important”, such as CNN.com, have higher voting power over individual users. It is doubtful whether the existence of linkage between these “important websites” and the search result necessary means that that particular result is more relevant than others.

4.    Political Concerns
    As the world’s largest web search engine, Google has faced several political challenges before. The most significant and recent one is the retrieval of Google China from Mainland China. There were rumors that the retrieval was because the adhesion of the Google China search engine to the Internet censorship policies of China that blocks and filters webpage that are considered as “threats” to the Central People’s Government, contradicts the main thesis of Google “Don’t be Evil”.

    Apart from the Google China event, Google search engine also faces some criticism and concerns on the topic of privacy and copyright in the United States (Google, 2010).

   These political related issues, especially those related to the privacy of the users of Google and the search results, will be the major concern of Google in the future.

Conclusion

    Undoubtedly, Google is the most successful web search engine in the world. The key to success of it includes mainly four aspects, which has already been discussed in this paper. They include prevailing technology, such as the effective PageRank system and the fast speed; economy of scale of Google Inc. that creates great entrance barriers for new search engines; good management of human resources and the effective strategy adopted by Google. Without any of these factors, Google would not have been so successful.

    However, there still exist drawbacks of Google Search’s popularity and potential threats, including some minor technical problems, potential threats of being used to generate profits while hurting the relevance of the search results, the limitations of the PageRank system, and last but not least, political concerns. In the future, Google need to be very careful while expanding its web search engine to the world and takes these factors into account while producing strategy. Otherwise, failures such as the Google China retrieval event are very likely to occur because of careless expansion.

Reference

1. http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
5. http://www.pluggd.in/google-search-success-story-297/
6. http://www.scribd.com/doc/16062744/Googles-Success
7. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_search#cite_note-2
9. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TYT3WRC342-2N&_user=10&_coverDate=04/30/1998&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=26082a6c8990076ec40b2b90d0fa73db&searchtype=a
10. http://www.successfactors.com/google/