Google is a search company based in the United States. It earns revenues through advertising, which is related to Internet searches, social networking, video sharing and others. The Google office is located in Mountain View, California and has approximately 20 thousand employees as of September 2008.  Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of which are PhD students at Stanford University.

History of Google Search Company

Google initially started as a research project for Larry Page and was later joined by Sergey Brin. They made a hypothesis that a search engine would be able to make analysis on the relationships between sites and eventually give better ranking results in accordance with the number of times it was searched.
Google Products and Services

There are various products and services that Google has created for the public and enterprises. In addition to these, Google has also earned from the following:

1. Advertising – It is claimed that 99% of Google’s current revenue is derived from advertising programs. In 2006, it was reported that Google earned 10.4 Billion dollars in revenues vis-à-vis a measly 112 Million dollars in licensing. It has become very effective with its DoubleClick technology and Google Analytics.

2. Software – Google is also a popular search engine service and is considered to be the most used search engine with a 53.6 market share. Google has indexed billions of web pages using keywords and operators.

Later, Google also launched it own email service called Gmail, which specifically offers a spam-filtering technology and the ability to use Google technology to search emails.
There are other products and services that have been quite popular and effective. The future holds a lot of possibilities in terms of what Google might be thinking of doing next.

Google OpenSocial refers to a set of common application programming interfaces that application developers may utilize to be able to create applications that work on any social networks or hosts that wants to participate. This was released in the year 2007 and all applications that implemented OpenSocial APIS is interoperable with any social network system that supports them.

When Google OpenSocial was implemented, it experienced several problems in terms of vulnerabilities in security.  It also did not work so well at the start when it can only be run on Okrut, which is owned by Google. It also has a limited number of gadgets. Another criticism was that it was easily cracked for as short as 20 minutes.

What are the benefits?

OpenSocial does not have its own mark-up language: Developers use normal javascript and html. The main benefits of Google OpenSocial is that it can be used by developers using their existing front end code and pattern it after OpenSocial. The creation therefore of applications is easier with Google OpenSocial.

Secondly, there are applications that have full functionality on profile with regards to specific rules of every host. Facebook limits its functionality to the canvas page and therefore has limited features. Google OpenSocial, however, is silent when it comes to rules and policies of the hosts. There are no rules on whether advertising is accepted or if a developer can get inside without application. It is the hosts that make the policies while the APIs offers maximum flexibility.

The future of Google OpenSocial is quite bright because there is no need to learn another mark-up language for every social network platform and also its flexibility in terms of rules and policies.

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that gives text of books that Google scans and eventually stores in its digital database. It started in 2004 as Google Print. A user searching for books may use Google Book Search, which gives an interface showing some pages from the searched book. It also contains some advertisements and links from the publisher of the website and the sellers of the book.

However, not all the pages of the book can be viewed in Google Book Search. Through the use of access limitations and some security measures, Google was able to limit the number of viewed pages and also prevents people from printing and copying some of the text.

Current Issues on Google Book Search

Presently, Google was able to reach an agreement with various authors and publishers in their various lawsuits against Google book search. Google shall be paying 125 million dollars to settle claims, which is said to be small, compared with its available 14 Billion cash. It is also said that with the settling of these claims, Google and other parties came out as winners.

Why is that? Google was able to acquire the digital rights of the books, which means more content to monetize. Other search engines don’t have access to this, which gives them a competitive advantage.

The authors and publishers also are winners because they have an initial settlement and at the same time some revenue from out of prints works. These revenues would never have been earned through the usual means.

An individual who wants to sell his products and services fast could benefit from Google Adwords campaign. It is said that an individual can set it up so easily in a few minutes and get good money in a few days.

What is Google AdWords campaign?

It refers to small pay per click ads that can be seen on the right side of Google search results. It offers highly targeted text and image ads based on what words people will be using to search for the product.
Running a Google Adwords Campaign Tips

First, an individual must establish his goals and targets. Would he want to have 100 sales in a month? Having some targets will aid in creating a basis for the campaign whether to position the product or just recapture sales.

Second, individuals must have a list of keywords, which can be learned from SEO books. It is also better to create a campaign using brand names to be able to create some familiarity with Adwords platform.

Third, individuals must also strategize to be able to save money from his Google Adwords campaign. He must be aware that he doesn’t have to appear in the top three results. Being on the first page is enough.

Fourth, using Google Adwords campaign is good because an individual gets his targeted audience. It is better to have a few targeted audiences than have thousands of untargeted audiences because the former has bigger possibilities of buying than the former.

Every website owner whether selling a product or not wants his website to be effective. Building a website is easy but the question lies on whether it shall reach the target audience as effectively.

Learn the Tips

1. The first consideration is to be able to build a website based on the evaluation of the website audience. Knowing what they want would help the website owner to customize his content to fit their interests, needs and expectations. Building a website means that he will be competing with so many websites offering the same products and information.
2. A website owner must also remember that even if he has a great product to sell, the design of the web spells a big difference on its success. He must make sure that the created website shall look professional
3. Once a website owner has created a professional looking website, the next step would be how his website can be found by the target audience. Search engines such as Google can do this work. Google will make sure that the website shall appear among the top search results. It uses a secret automated software algorithm to rank websites. One of the ways to increase traffic to websites is to determine the keywords that the customers will surely use.  Another way is link popularity wherein Google shall rank the website based on the linked sites there.

Making sure that the target audience shall find the website is not the last step in building an effective website. Website owners must also make sure that the contents shall be interesting enough for people to stay and browse.