Reintroducing Google

"Don't be evil" is the code of conduct the Google Company abides by, to quote its owners, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served ― as shareholders and in all other ways ― by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."

Google is a popular web based search engine which runs its business unlike any other. The starting page of google.com itself is clean unobtrusive and sleek making download time faster. Google is preferred by a lot of users because of this. The term Google itself had a very quirky start it was a misspelling of the term googol referring to a number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. What started off as quirk turned out to become reality The Google Company grew to rashomon proportions and is now estimated to have a billion dollar revenue. At the very start, Google was a brainchild of Larry Page then a Phd student at Stanford University who was doing a dissertation thesis on the World Wide Web and its mathematical structure. Because of a misspelling the term google stuck and it was formally registered on September 15, 1997. On September 4, 2001, a patent describing part of Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted. The patent named Lawrence Page as the inventor.

But just what is Google aside from being a popular search engine?

Google is also involved in philanthropic acts. One of their activities is the establishment of Google.org giving it a staggering fund of $1 billion. Climate change, global public health and global poverty are just among the issues the organization wants to help. The development of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg is just one of its first projects.

Google has also worked with several corporations to enhance productivity and services. One such is its partnership with NASA wherein they work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. Google has also partnered with Time Warner's AOL unit for video searches and Fox to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp. websites

Google has been known for its forward thinking and made some very smart acquisitions over the years. One such example is the acquisition of Blogger from Pyra Labs which is a weblog publishing platform. This led to many of its premium features becoming free. The user friendly Google Docs and Spreadsheets is also a result of the company's acquisition of Upstartle, a company responsible for the online collaborative word processor Writely which was combined with Google Spreadsheets. Another of its popular buy outs is You tube which it purchased for $1.65 Billion dollars in 2006.

At the present Google now provides service for a range of tasks and they run several products to do so. Just some of their products are: Gmail, for e-mail purposes, Picasa for photos, and Google maps which is a Mapping service that indexes streets and satellite imagery, providing driving directions and local business search.

Reah is an online journalist who writes about Google on her Google Fan Blog