For Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, the growing breadth of Google’s empire was a source of pride:

Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube … Today we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. While digitizing all the world’s books is an ambitious goal, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographical needs … Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners … In addition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products now includes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more … Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs …2

The concern of many stock analysts was that most of Google’s diversifying initiatives did nothing to boost revenue, let alone generate profit. The Financial Times’ Lex column dubbed Google a “one-trick pony”: “Google has what amounts to a license to print money. By inserting itself between the shops and shoppers of the world, the search provider takes a small commission every time it connects the two.” Beyond its core search business, Google’s activities only added cost:

[J]ust look at YouTube, the video-sharing website Google bought for $1.8bn—paid mostly in stock—in 2006. The site supplies about 40 per cent of all videos watched online worldwide for free. That generosity comes at tremendous cost, as very few of its videos carry advertising. Credit Suisse estimates YouTube’s running costs will be between $500m and $1bn this year, while revenues will only be in the region of $240m. Even with the addition of more professionally created content, the economics appear unsustainable.3
With Google’s revenue growth hit by the 2008 recession while its costs continued to rise rapidly, some investors believed that it was time to rein in Google’s chaotic expansion and develop a more focused strategy founded upon a clear recognition that the basis of Google’s business model was the advertising revenues that flowed through which its dominance of internet word searches. Table 21.1 shows financial data for Google.

Google’s Founding

Google was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University. In January 1996, Page’s search for a dissertation topic led him to examine the linkage structure of the World Wide Web. Page and Brin developed a page-ranking algorithm that used backlink data (references by a Web page to other Web pages) to measure the importance of any Web page. Although several rudimentary Web search engines were in existence, most selected Web pages on the basis of the frequency with which a particular search word appeared. They called their search engine “Google” and on September 15, 1997 registered the domain name google.com. They incorporated Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 in Menlo Park, California. Google’s “PageRank” algorithm was granted a patent on September 4, 2001.

Google met an essential need of the rapidly growing number of people who were turning to the World Wide Web for information and commercial transactions. As the number of web sites grew exponentially, locating relevant web content became a critical need. Page and Brin were not alone in recognizing the potential for a search engine. Among the early crawler-based Web search engines were WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Several of these search engines became popular “portal sites”—web sites that offered users their first port of entry to the Web. Given that the primary purpose of a portal was to guide users to the information and commercial services offered by the web, other portal sites soon recognized the need to offer a search facility. Yahoo! licensed AltaVista’s search engine, then in 1998 replaced AltaVista with Inktomi.

The Google search engine attracted a rapidly growing following because of its superior page ranking and its simple design—it did not compromise its search functionality by attempting to become a portal. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements—paid web links associated with search keywords. These “sponsored links” were brief, plain text ads with a click-on URL, which appeared alongside with Web search results for specific keywords. Advertisers bid for keywords; it was these “cost-per-click” bids weighted by an ad’s click-through rate (CTR) that determined the order in which a sponsored links would appear. In offering a Web-based advertising system linking third-party advertisers to a search engine of informational web site, Google’s system copied many of the features of the then market leader, Overture. After 2000, Google experienced explosive growth and was boosted in May 2002 by AOL’s decision to adopt Google’s search engine and its paid listings service.

Page and Brin’s initial funding was a $100 000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In June 1999, larger funding was obtained from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. On August 19, 2004 an initial public offering of about 7% of Google’s shares raised $1.67 billion, giving Google a market capitalization of $23 billion.
With Google’s revenue growth hit by the 2008 recession while its costs continued to rise rapidly, some investors believed that it was time to rein in Google’s chaotic expansion and develop a more focused strategy founded upon a clear recognition that the basis of Google’s business model was the advertising revenues that flowed through which its dominance of internet word searches. Table 21.1 shows financial data for Google.

Google’s Founding

Google was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University. In January 1996, Page’s search for a dissertation topic led him to examine the linkage structure of the World Wide Web. Page and Brin developed a page-ranking algorithm that used backlink data (references by a Web page to other Web pages) to measure the importance of any Web page. Although several rudimentary Web search engines were in existence, most selected Web pages on the basis of the frequency with which a particular search word appeared. They called their search engine “Google” and on September 15, 1997 registered the domain name google.com. They incorporated Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 in Menlo Park, California. Google’s “PageRank” algorithm was granted a patent on September 4, 2001.

Google met an essential need of the rapidly growing number of people who were turning to the World Wide Web for information and commercial transactions. As the number of web sites grew exponentially, locating relevant web content became a critical need. Page and Brin were not alone in recognizing the potential for a search engine. Among the early crawler-based Web search engines were WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Several of these search engines became popular “portal sites”—web sites that offered users their first port of entry to the Web. Given that the primary purpose of a portal was to guide users to the information and commercial services offered by the web, other portal sites soon recognized the need to offer a search facility. Yahoo! licensed AltaVista’s search engine, then in 1998 replaced AltaVista with Inktomi.

The Google search engine attracted a rapidly growing following because of its superior page ranking and its simple design—it did not compromise its search functionality by attempting to become a portal. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements—paid web links associated with search keywords. These “sponsored links” were brief, plain text ads with a click-on URL, which appeared alongside with Web search results for specific keywords. Advertisers bid for keywords; it was these “cost-per-click” bids weighted by an ad’s click-through rate (CTR) that determined the order in which a sponsored links would appear. In offering a Web-based advertising system linking third-party advertisers to a search engine of informational web site, Google’s system copied many of the features of the then market leader, Overture. After 2000, Google experienced explosive growth and was boosted in May 2002 by AOL’s decision to adopt Google’s search engine and its paid listings service.

Page and Brin’s initial funding was a $100 000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In June 1999, larger funding was obtained from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. On August 19, 2004 an initial public offering of about 7% of Google’s shares raised $1.67 billion, giving Google a market capitalization of $23 billion.

However, Google’s entrepreneurial and technological dynamism also resulted in initiatives that extended beyond the accessing and organizing of information. Since the introduction of Gmail in 2004, Google offered a widening array of software and services for communicating, creating and manipulating 2D and 3D images, producing documents, creating Web pages, managing time and social networking. For example: Google Docs is a suite of software for creating, storing and sharing text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; Blogger is software that allows individuals to create their own Web logs; Google Groups allows individuals to establish and support communication within a group formed around a particular interest or identity; Orkut is a social networking service; Picasa is downloadable software for organizing, editing and sharing photographs. The Appendix describes Google’s products and services.

Most of these additional products and services offered no new revenue opportunities for Google. However, Google was also expanding its advertising-based revenue model. Google’s primary source of advertising revenue is AdWords launched in 2000. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches google.com, short text advertisements appear as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen. AdWords also places advertisement on third party web sites through the Google Partner Network.
AdSense uses an advertisement placement technology developed by Applied Semantics which Google acquired in 2003. It allows Google to place ads on third party web sites. In 2008, 32% of Google’s advertising revenue was derived from partners’ web sites, and 68% from its own web sites.

The Appendix explains AdWords and AdSense in greater detail. Table 21.2 shows Google’s revenues from advertising.

In 2007 and 2008, Google’s diversification efforts took a dramatic new turn with Google’s entry into mobile telephony and Web browsers.

Android and Mobile Telephony

In November 2007, Google, in collaboration with its partners in the Open Handset Alliance, announced its Android wireless communication software platform. PC Advisor commented:

Google’s announcement of the Android mobile development platform … is yet another example of the lengths the company will go to keep its advertising business growing at a jaw-dropping rate. It is also another awe-inspiring—or terrifying, depending on one’s perspective—display of the engineering and business resources Google can unleash and of the power it has to influence, disrupt and rearrange markets …
“What we have here is Google trying to move the whole mobile internet forward through this alliance,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.
In a nutshell, Google announced a free, open-source application development platform called Android for mobile devices with the intention of eclipsing existing operating systems from Microsoft, Symbian, Palm and others …
Android will have a complete set of components, including a Linux-based operating system, middleware stack, customizable user interface and applications.
Google envisions that with Android, developers will flood the mobile market with new applications and online services that can be written once and deployed in many phones, something that, as Google sees it, the current mobile technical fragmentation prevents.
The goal: to radically improve the creation, delivery and provision of mobile online services and applications, in the hope that as people find the experience more satisfying, their mobile web and internet usage will balloon, along with online ad revenue …
Ultimately, what is propelling Google in this effort is its core advertising business, which the company recognizes it must extend to the mobile market. A small market today, mobile advertising is expected to attain a significant size in coming years. According to Opus Research, mobile advertising spending in North America and Western Europe will reach a combined $5.08bn by 2012, up from an estimated $106.8m at the end of this year. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 116%. Opus Research, which released the forecast last week, said that improving the mobile user experience will prompt more people to spend more time using the internet via their mobile phones. This in turn will fuel ad revenue growth.
In the end, independently of what ends up happening, Google’s entry into the mobile market is a welcome development, Dulaney said. “We need powerful players from the ‘wired’ internet market to get into the mobile space to break up the tight control carriers have had on content,” Dulaney said. “So far, carriers have controlled all the content and they’ve been bad at it. Innovation has been stifled.”6
A few weeks later Google announced its intention of bidding in the Federal Communication Commission’s upcoming auction of 700MHz wireless spectrum. The interesting feature of Google’s bid was that it had no desire to win the auction. Its intention was to force the major telecom service providers into the auction so that a new section of the wireless spectrum would be developed for the wireless internet service. Google lobbying had already ensured that whoever developed this portion of spectrum would be required to allow users to download any software application they wanted on their mobile device and to use any mobile devices they liked on that wireless network. In January 2008, the FCC announced that AT&T and Verizon had won the auction bidding a total of $16 billion. Many observers believed that the real winner was Google: while AT&T and Verizon would bear the costs of developing the 700MHz waveband, Google would be able to offer its Android system and mobile internet services without any of the upfront costs.7

Chrome

Google’s announcement of its Chrome Web browser on September 2, 2008, generated huge publicity, but little surprise. It was widely known that founders Brin and Page had wanted to launch a Web browser since Google’s early days. For several years Google had been the main source of technical and financial support for Mozilla’s Firefox browser. According to the Google’s head of product development, Sundar Pichai: “Google’s entire business is people using a browser to access us and the web.” Google’s explanation of its decision to launch its own browser emphasized the improved functionality for users: “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier,” claimed Google’s web site. Microsoft’s internet Explorer by contrast was limited by the legacy of its 15 year history, which meant that it was optimized for JavaScript or Web 2.0.

However, most observers believed that Google’s strategic intent was not simply a superior user experience. An additional motive imputed to Google was its desire to protect the threat posed by the new version of Microsoft’s internet Explorer (IE). Version 8 of IE launched in beta mode in August 2008 allowed an “InPrivate” protection mode that would delete cookies and make it more difficult to track users’ browsing habits. The result would be to limit Google’s ability to use such information for targeted advertising.

Others believed that Google’s primary intention was not so much to protect itself against Microsoft as to launch a direct attack upon Microsoft’s dominance of personal computing and to speed the transition of computing to a new online environment:

[Google Chrome] is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud—where Google holds advantage. And it’s an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft.8

The announcement 10 months later that Google would add an operating system to its Chrome browser was seen as confirmation that the primary motivation of Chrome was to strike against the core of Microsoft’s market strength.
Google’s phenomenal growth and capacity for innovation rested upon a management system that was unique, even by the unorthodox standards of Silicon Valley. In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel identified several key features of the management system built by founders Larry Page (President of Products) and Sergey Brin (President of Technology), and their “adult supervisor” Eric Schmidt (Chairman and CEO):

1. Hiring policy. Google only employs people who it believes to be exceptionally talented: “Google’s leaders believe that one exceptional technologist is many times more valuable than one average engineer; hence they insist on hiring only the brightest of the bright—folks out on the right-hand end of the bell-shaped curve. They also believe that if you let one ‘bozo’ in, more will surely follow. Their logic is simple: A-level people want to work with A-level people—fellow savants who will spark their thinking and accelerate their learning. Trouble is, B-level people are threatened by A-class talent, so once they get in the door, they tend to hire colleagues who are as unremarkable as they are.”
2. A “dramatically flat, radically decentralized” organization: “In many ways, Google is organized like the internet itself: it’s highly democratic, tightly connected, and flat. Like so much of Google’s culture, the source of the company’s radical decentralization can be traced back to Brin and Page, both of whom attended Montessori schools and credit much of their intellectual independence to that experience. Says Mayer: ‘They don’t like authority and they don’t like being told what to do.’ Brin and Page understand that breakthroughs come from questioning assumptions and smashing paradigms.”
3. Small, self-managing teams: “Roughly half of Google’s 10 000 employees—all those involved in product development—work in small teams, with an average of three engineers per team. Even a large project such as Gmail, which might occupy 30 people, is broken into teams of three or four, each of which works on a specific service enhancement, such as building spam filters or improving the forwarding feature. Each team has an ‘über-tech leader,’ a responsibility that rotates among team members depending on shifting project requirements. Most engineers work on more than one team, and no one needs the HR department’s permission to switch teams.”
4. Rapid, low-cost experimentation. “Evolutionary adaptation isn’t the product of a grand plan, but of relentless experimentation … Google’s ‘just-try-it’ philosophy is applied to even the company’s most daunting projects, like digitizing the world’s libraries. Like every new initiative, Google Book Search began with a makeshift experiment aimed at answering a critical question; in this case: how long does it take to digitize a book? To find out, Page and Mayer rigged up a piece of plywood with a couple of clamps and proceeded to photograph each page of a 300-page book, using a metronome to keep pace. With Mayer flipping pages, and one half of Google’s founding team taking digital snapshots, it took 40 minutes to turn the ink into pixels. An optical character recognition program soon turned the digital photos into digital text, and within five days the pair had ginned up a piece of software that could search the book. That kind of step-wise, learn-as-you-go approach has repeatedly helped Google to test critical assumptions and avoid making bet-the-farm mistakes.”9
The result was a constant impetus towards creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial initiative. Indeed, given the caliber and characteristics of Google’s employees, it was difficult to see how Google could not be a hotbed for innovation:

Our employees, who have named themselves Googlers, are everything. Google is organized around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. We have been lucky to recruit many creative, principled and hard working stars. We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will reward and treat them well … Because of our employee talent, Google is doing exciting work in nearly every area of computer science … Talented people are attracted to Google because we empower them to change the world; Google has large computational resources and distribution that enables individuals to make a difference. Our main benefit is a workplace with important projects, where employees can contribute and grow …10

The culture of creativity and innovation was institutionalized through Google’s “70-20-10” rule which stipulated that Google would devote 70% of its engineering resources to developing the core business, 20% to extend that core into related areas, with 10% allocated to fringe ideas.

Underlying Google’s capacity for innovation and the effective implementation of new initiatives was a set of resources that few other technology-based companies could match. With an operating cash flow of $7.9 billion in 2008 and a cash pile of $15.8 billion, Google was a financial powerhouse matched only by Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Apple. This financial strength allowed Google to buy its way through acquisition into almost any market or area of technology. Most of the time Google did not need buy its way into new market: like Apple, its brand (valued by Interbrand in 2008 at $25 billion—the world’s tenth most valuable) offered it instant credibility. Most important was a user base unmatched by any other IT company. With 776 million unique visitors to its web site every day, it reached an estimated 77% of the world’s internet audience daily.

Future Challenges

For all Google’s vitality and its manifest destiny to lead the next generation of information technology, there were those—both within Googleplex and outside—who perceived danger in Google’s trajectory. Despite a slowing during 2008, Google was expanding rapidly. Between 2003 and 2007 its revenues had grown from $1.5 billion to $21.8 billion and employees from 1628 to 20 222.11 Coordination was a growing problem; while the majority of Google’s employees were concentrated at its Mountain View, California, headquarters, Google had additional research and development and sales and support offices in 18 other cities throughout the U.S., as well as facilities in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.12

Growing size and complexity were recognized by Google as significant sources of risk:

We have experienced rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which has placed, and will continue to place, significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. If we do not effectively manage our growth, the quality of our products and services could suffer, which could negatively affect our brand and operating results. Our expansion and growth in international markets heightens these risks as a result of the particular challenges of supporting a rapidly growing business in an environment of multiple languages, cultures, customs, legal systems, alternative dispute systems, regulatory systems and commercial infrastructures. To effectively manage this growth, we will need to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls and our reporting systems and procedures.13
As Google increasingly displaced Microsoft as the world’s pre-eminent IT company, it would be a target for criticism and regulatory pressures. Under the headline “Is Google Too Powerful?,” the potential for Google to dominate the Web and media advertising was noted by Business Week early in 2007:

… Google has come to represent all our hopes, dreams, and fears about the disruptive promise and dangers of the internet. As this clash plays out over the next couple of years, the outcome could determine the way we’ll entertain ourselves, shop, socialize, and do business on the internet. The overriding question: Will the vast commercial landscape of the Net, like so many other tech markets in the past, condense to one dominant force for the foreseeable future? Will we just Google everything?14

By 2009, the dominant concern was less about market power in a traditional sense and more about the sheer mass of personal data that Google had access to. Google’s cookies allow it to track every Google user’s web browsing. Its online map service, “Street View,” allows views inside individuals’ home properties and the observation of visitors to those homes. Gmail allows Google an intimate view of personal communications of Gmail’s 30 million account holders.

These growing concerns about privacy and market power would impose additional pressures on Google’s top management team. Had the time come for Google’s leading trio—Brin, Page, and Schmidt—to scale back Google’s ambitions and draw boundaries around Google’s corporate strategy?

Appendix: Description of Google’s business and products (extracts from Google, 10-K Report for 2008)

Overview

Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information. Our innovations in web search and advertising have made our web site a top internet property and our brand one of the most recognized in the world. We maintain a large index of web sites and other online content, which we make freely available via our search engine to anyone with an internet connection. Our automated search technology helps people obtain nearly instant access to relevant information from our vast online index.

We generate revenue primarily by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising. Businesses use our AdWords program to promote their products and services with targeted advertising. In addition, the thousands of third-party web sites that comprise the Google Network use our AdSense program to deliver relevant ads that generate revenue and enhance the user experience …

Our Mission

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We believe that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. We have found that offering a high-quality user experience leads to increased traffic and strong word-of-mouth promotion. Our dedication to putting users first is reflected in three key commitments:

  We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we do not accept payment for search result ranking or inclusion.
  We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful advertising. Advertisements should not be an annoying interruption. If any element on a search result page is influenced by payment to us, we will make it clear to our users.
  We will never stop working to improve our user experience, our search technology and other important areas of information organization.
We believe that our user focus is the foundation of our success to date. We also believe that this focus is critical for the creation of long-term value. We do not intend to compromise our user focus for short-term economic gain.

How We Provide Value to Our Users

We serve our users by developing products that quickly and easily find, create, organize and share information. We place a premium on products that matter to many people and have the potential to improve their lives.

Some of the key benefits we offer include:

Comprehensiveness and Relevance

Our search technologies sort through a vast and growing amount of information to deliver relevant and useful search results in response to user queries. This is an area of continual development for us. When we started the company in 1998, our Web index contained approximately 30 million documents. We now index billions of Web pages and strive to provide the most comprehensive search experience possible …

Objectivity

We believe it is very important that the results users get from Google are produced with only their interests in mind. We do not accept payment for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but the advertising is clearly marked and separated and does not influence how we generate our search results. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising …

Global Access

We strive to provide our services to everyone in the world and the Google interface is available in 120 languages …

Ease of Use

We have always believed that the most useful and powerful search technology hides its complexity from users and gives them a simple, intuitive way to get the information they want. We have devoted significant efforts to create a streamlined and easy-to-use interface based on a clean search box set prominently on a page free of commercial clutter …

Pertinent, Useful Commercial Information

The search for information often involves an interest in commercial information—researching a purchase, comparing products and services or actively shopping. We help people find commercial information through our search services and advertising products …

Multiple Access Platforms

The mobile phone is the primary way that many people around the world access the internet. We have continued to invest in improving mobile search and have introduced applications that allow users to access search, email, maps, directions and satellite imagery through their mobile devices.

Improving the Web

We want to make the Web experience as good as possible for users around the world. This includes providing platforms for developers to build, deploy and run increasingly rich applications. For users, we are investing in areas to improve their experience in using web-based applications, including making browsers more stable and powerful.

Products and Services for our Users

Our product development philosophy involves rapid and continuous innovation, with frequent releases of early-stage products that we then iterate and improve. We often make products available early in their development stages by posting them on Google Labs, at test locations online or directly on Google.com. If our users find a product useful, we promote it to “beta” status for additional testing. Once we are satisfied that a product is of high quality and utility, we remove the beta label and make it a core Google product. Our main products and services are described below:
We are focused on building products and services on our web sites that benefit our users and let them find relevant information quickly and easily. These products and services include:

Google Web Search

In addition to providing easy access to billions of Web pages, we have integrated special features into Google Web Search to help people find exactly what they are looking for on the Web.

Google Image Search

Google Image Search is our searchable index of images found across the web. To extend the usefulness of Google Image Search we offer advanced features, such as searching by image size, format and coloration and restricting searches to specific web sites or domains.

Google Book Search

Google Book Search lets users search the full text of a library-sized collection of books to discover books of interest and to learn where to buy or borrow them …

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to do a broad search for relevant scholarly literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles …

Google Finance

Google Finance provides a simple user interface to navigate complex financial information in an intuitive manner …

Google News

Google News gathers information from thousands of news sources worldwide and presents news stories in a searchable format within minutes of their publication on the Web …

Google Video

Google Video lets users upload, find, view and share video content worldwide.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search enables users to search the blogging universe more effectively and find out users’ opinions on a wide variety of subjects. The Google Blog Search index includes every blog that publishes a site feed.

iGoogle and Personalized Search

iGoogle connects users to the information that is most useful and important to them in an easy-to-use and customizable format …

Google Product Search

Google Product Search helps users find and compare products from online stores across the web and directs users to where they can buy these products …

Google Custom Search

Google Custom Search allows communities of users familiar with particular topics to build customized search engines …

Google Base

Google Base lets content owners submit content that they want to share on Google web sites …

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools provides information to webmasters to help them enhance their understanding of how their web sites interact with the Google search engine …

Applications

Information created by a single user becomes much more valuable when shared and combined with information from other people or places. Therefore our strategy for products we develop in this space is simple: develop tools for our users to create, share and communicate any information generated by the user, thus making the information more useful and manageable. Examples of products we have developed with this strategy in mind include:

Google Docs

Google Docs allows our users to create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from anywhere using a browser …