Google Hits Double DigitsGoogle turns 10 on Sunday. In the corporate world, it's still just a baby--but the Internet king's meteoric rise makes this birthday a milestone.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company created the booming online advertising industry, turning Internet searches into cash to the tune of $16.5 billion in annual revenues. Google's stock price has a life of its own. It shot past $700 last year and has since fallen back to $450; its market cap is now at $142 billion, which puts it in league with the likes of Bank of America and Hewlett-Packard. Those companies, however, have annual revenues of more than $100 billion.
Since going public, the company has used its Googlebucks to acquire a slew of innovative startups--ranging from photo-sharing service Picasa, video site YouTube and even the core of its Google Earth mapping service. It also has raised a bunch of homegrown consumer favorites, including e-mail service Gmail and social networking site, Orkut.
The number of searches it handles has grown astronomically. In 1998, Google reported that it handled 10,000 searches a day. That number leaped to 500,000 a day in 1999. Google doesn't share those numbers widely now, but research group comScore estimates that Google hosted 235 million searches a day in July of this year.
There's another way to gauge Google's growth. The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million Web pages. In July, a Google search engineer tallied up how many unique URLs the company searches to find content: the number was 1 trillion. At this rate, a "googol" worth of pages (or 1 followed by 100 zeros) can only be a few years away.
Now the Internet king is going after much more: It wants to be a worldwide data center that stores every piece of personal and corporate information. Google is pushing cloud computing to accomplish this--and challenging tech's old top dog Microsoft to pick up the pace or go home. This week, Google unveiled Chrome, a Web browser aimed at toppling Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Google's maverick corporate culture and slogans have also made headlines. Employees work inside a compound that mimics a college campus, get free organic meals and are allowed to work on a pet project one day a week. The company has said repeatedly that it wants to make the world a better place. Its defining slogan was "Don't be evil," but it has been officially modified to "You can make money without doing evil."
Indeed, Google has become one of those companies that epitomizes an era, introducing literally transformative technology on the global stage.
But Google's meteoric rise wasn't part of a calculated plan--initially. Back in 1998, Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin just happened to take an interest in organizing information on the Web, and in true Silicon Valley fashion, they founded Google in a friend's Menlo Park, Calif., garage.
Soon after, Google stumbled upon a way to make money from advertisements placed alongside online searches results and hired Eric Schmidt, who had headed Novell and served as chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, for adult supervision. The trio of Schmidt, Page and Brin have turned Google into a money machine and innovation powerhouse.
But what goes up must come down, right? Probably. Wall Street used to count on Google for hitting or surpassing analysts' earnings targets, but the company had a few misses the past year due to hiring sprees and technical changes to its search algorithms.
And there's the perennial question of whether Google needs to diversify its revenue stream in case businesses find better and cheaper ways to advertise. So far, the company hasn't found another way to make money--and it's not very concerned about it either. Google believes that if superior technology finds users, users will help it find a business plan.
Oh, let's not worry about all that boring stuff now. It's time to celebrate 10 years in business. But don't expect music, dancing and laughter at the Googleplex Sunday. Even though Google was incorporated on Sept. 7, the company says it has never partied on this day and doesn't plan to start now.
By: Wendy Tanaka
Forbes.com; September 5, 2008
