The effects of Google on global networking and researching

The effects of Google on global networking and researching

Introduction

Google is the leading search engine used by millions of internet users all over the world. The organization started with a search engine in 1996. The organization's mission is to “Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Since the company started, the world has evolved tremendously. Over the past twenty years, society has become reliant on the accessibility of information on the internet. The demographic of internet users has advanced since the beginning of the new millennium. When most people think of finding information online, Google.com is usually the preferred search engine. Although the organization has an excellent success story, there have been legal matters that affect the way business is conducted at Google.

When the founders initially started Google, the owners were attempting to identify the importance of individual web pages. After fifteen years, the organization has grown and is available all over the world. In the year 2000, Google introduced the first 10 language versions of the search engine. The company identified the need to expand the capabilities of the search engine. Google was able to bring the fast paced search service to customers globally. After the initial ten languages, the organization quickly added new languages to the site. This introduction of the languages also carried over into the different companies under the Google umbrella.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau statistics, over 70 percent of United States households has access to the internet at home. The statistics also indicate that these households include families of all economic, educational and ethnic backgrounds. The internet was primarily used by the younger generation in previous years. The Census also identified 81.53% as the highest percentage of internet usage in homes. The age group of the high internet usage was between 35 - 44 years old. This indicates that the use of the worldwide web is not limited to the younger generation as in previous years.

Google has acquired several companies during the past 15 years. In 2006, the company acquired YouTube, a video sharing website. YouTube has to compete with several other video sharing sites such as vimeo, metacafe and dailymotion. The revenue generated from YouTube is not provided by the company. It has been speculated that advertising sales exceed that of the competition. Metacafe has the second largest viewership of a video sharing site at 40 million worldwide. The company boasts that they offer more exclusive videos than any other video sharing site online.

Discussion

Network effects in paid search markets are very prevalent. For example, Google uses AdSense to create the network effect by taking advertisers' ads and placing them on editorial content such as blogs and news postings that are relevant to the advertisement. In order to successfully execute this, Google uses its own tools (i.e. Google Analytics) to determine the relevance of the content to the advertisement. This makes the benefits of Google's AdSense strategy more appealing ...