In his book Planet Google the author, Randall Stross, covers Google’s controversial move into the scanning of books.

In 2002 the company took up the challenge of digitizing all books with no clear profit motive in sight; though the project would be expected to return a profit at some point give the investment involved.

The initial startup was Google Print, which met some opposition from publishers. Two lawsuits from book publishers and the Authors Guild ensured, while Google subsequently dropped the name Google Print, adopting the name Google Book Search, saying the name ‘Print’ had created the impression the service allowed users to print out books.

Mid-2007 it added listings for books whose text had not been indexed, using publicly available bibliographic information drawn from online library catalogues around the world. These books were shown on search pages with "No preview available„" a new category distinguishing it from "full preview", "limited preview" and "snippet view".

The lawsuits have been settled and Google’s book scanning project continues. In February of this year the company announced that with the co-operation of the University of Michigan, it now had one million books online - though 6.5 million copies of the university’s book collection remains to be scanned.

In its brief life (Google was founded in 1998) the company has expanded in other directions. YouTube was purchased after its own effort Google Video failed to stymie the rapid ascent of that company’s hold on the online video phenomenon market. As well, it purchased a software company Keyhole, which gave a huge boost to the fledgling Google Maps team, resulting in the subsequent development of Google Earth and Google Street View.

This dramatic shift in supplying services beyond just web searches, along with its lucrative text-ads spinoff, makes Google standout. Although renowned for its corporate mantra of "Don’t Be Evil", a more relevant one would be "We Are Ambitious".

The company has embraced software-as-a service and cloud computing, and wants to replace the basic software on individual PCs with software services that run on its own machines. This has been done on a piecemeal basis.

As Stross notes:
"Among the applications, are an online word processor that it acquired in 2006, originally called Writely, and an online spreadsheet that Google developed internally. In October 2006, the company rechristened the two as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Determined not to be copying its rival [Microsoft], Google stubbornly refuses to use the name that would be most natural: Google Office."

The company utilised hardware and software designed to scale up fast and cheaply, and when it chanced upon text ads linked to key word searches as an advertising medium its financial returns have been astonishing.

Yet, this remains Google’s only real money spinner. YouTube, Google Earth, Google Book Search or Street View have not as yet individually reached a financial break through in revenue earned.

Certainly, this drawing together of so many strands has helped brand Google in the eyes of internet users as the search engine of choice. In April it reached a US milestone when the number of visitors to its US sites exceeded that of all competitors.

As Stross notes:
"The intangible value to Google of having so many kinds of information under a single roof cannot be calculated precisely, but it’s likely that all Google properties share a halo effect. Each appeals to more users simply because of its Google identity and the way the very mulitiplicity of services conveys authority."

The subtitle to this book is "One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organise Everything We Know". Given that company founder Sergey Brin is quoted as saying Google would not "shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects because of short-term earnings pressure," that claim does not seem at all audacious.

In the book’s conclusion Stross contends Google’s ascendance has been accompanied by Microsoft’s decline, and he says that IBM in the mainframe era could not head off Digital Equipment Corporation in the minicomputer era , which in turn could not head off Microsoft in the PC era and that no computer company has remained dominant over two successive technological eras.

However, Google is not a computer company. It is a service company that runs on computers. And therein is the difference between Google and the three previous examples.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher December 19, 2008 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

Randall Stross’ book ‘Planet Google’ kicks off with an investigation into what is ‘open’ and ‘closed’ within the online world.

The open nature of the web is epitomised in wiki sites such as Wikipedia that anyone can contribute to, while social networking sites such as Facebook only let members enter. Google’s success has been a result of the overwhelmingly open nature of the web.

Stross notes that although Google’s stellar success is due to this open nature, and the company uses open-source software extensively, it has not placed its own proprietary search formula into the public domain. This is hardly surprising.

The formula for Coke is still a closely guarded secret, while the mixture involving those ‘eleven herbs and spices’ that tingle the tastebuds after eating a tub of KFC is not in the public domain.

In the early days of the web (the 90s), it was an environment where people shared information for free. As the web grew, more people and organisations placed information online without attempting to charge for it.

This growth in pages on the web nicely set Google up at its launch in 1998. Search engines operating at the time were being overwhelmed by the escalating number of pages.

It was Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company founders, development of the ‘spider’, the software that ‘crawls’ the web indexing and analysing pages in readiness for the submission of a search request, that set Google apart from the competition.

Stross makes this point:
”As fast as Google software appears to perform a search, it should be remembered that when Google receives a search request, its search does not at that moment check the world’s web sites, but rather checks the copies of those sites that were collected earlier and stored on Google’s servers.”

The company’s ordering of search results is entirely a matter of mathematics, which has allowed processing scalability as the number of web pages has rocketed into the billions. As well, it has assembled, what is thought to be, the largest cluster of computers in the world.

Stross has this to say:
”By developing the ability to stamp out data centres cost-effectively in bulk, Google has the means to expand its data collection without limits, to scale its business without pausing. As fast as its business has grown, the company has never run out of capacity and been forced to hold off on the introduction of new services. … This permits the company to expand, and expand, and expand.”

Since its inception Google has maintained a policy of no human intervention in search results. Page and Brin decided that the only way to scale their systems to handle all of the world’s information was by automating all processes. To allow human intervention would slow the search engine and to achieve scale to deal with the rocketing number of web pages the search process was, and remains to this day, wholly automated.

Stross notes:
”Yahoo’s inability to scale its human-edited directory as the Web expanded showed the limitations of a system that relied upon humans.
”Not only has Google trounced its rivals by its reliance on the Alogrithm, but it has also achieved an extraordinary feat of corporate branding. Its name has become synonymous with searching the web - googling is now a generic term.”

Posted by Rodney Fletcher December 11, 2008 3:03 PM | Comments (0)

I’ve been reading Randall Stross’ book 'Planet Google', subtitled One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organise Everything We Know.

The author is a New York Times columnist who has written a number of books commenting on IT, and this latest tome is a fascinating read.

In the introduction he points out that a mere five years after the company was founded the verb google was recognised by the American Dialect Society - which alone shows just how far and fast the company has traveled.

And all by what I would call a ‘happy accident‘, at least for the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, early employees and the venture capital firms that backed the fledgling start-up in 1998. Effectively, two years after its launch the company discovered that plain text advertising on its search results pages produces quite stunning profits.

The company began placing ads in 2000 and even by 2002 the text ads didn’t appear to be that much of a money-spinner. Yet, as Stross says:
”Those unprepossessing text ads, however, were providing advertisers one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching desirable customers ever devised in the history of advertising.”

If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider Googles’ revenue curve: 2002, US $400 million; 2003 $1.4 billion; 2005 $6.1 billion; 2007 $16.5 billion. Stross states 99 percent of the company’s revenue comes from those text ads.

Google’s ”Don’t Be Evil” mantra that helped define the company has, however, taken a hammering. Its decision in 2006 to set up shop in China and allow search results to be filtered by the Chinese government was seen as craven, and a recent story on search results in China indicate the company’s premise that the eventual goal of unfiltered access eventually being available to the Chinese people is nothing less than naive.

Web searching and the placement of text advertising has been the backbone of the company’s profit, yet it has far loftier goals than just being the number-one search engine on the internet.

In 1999, in its first press release, the company said it wanted to ”organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. This was quite a jump from the original statement placed on the website just seven months before, when it was launched in 1998. Then the founders simply stated it was designed: ”To make it easier to find high-quality information on the web”.

It certainly has gone well beyond that as the company will now store your photos, videos, email, word processing documents, calendar, word processing documents, spreadsheets, personal blog, instant messaging chats, social network messages and (if it’s still worth any money) your stock portfolio.

And let’s not forget the purchase of YouTube ($1.65 billion), Google Earth, StreetView and its controversial Book Search.

Look, the company just wants to be your very best online buddy. Moreover, with those ubiquitous text ads raking in the money, it has the financial clout to create new divisions that don’t actually have to make money straight away.

This expansion in services on offer has brought about a jump in staff numbers, from 1628 in 2003 to 16,805 in 2007. However, as magical as Google’s rise is, from start-up to becoming an international brand as well known as Coca Cola and Mickey Mouse in just ten years, it has also been hit by the financial meltdown with a falling stock price and a recent curtailment of contract workers.

Stross concludes in the introduction to his book:
”Google’s future will be determined to no small degree by the view that its users hold of the company itself. Google has enjoyed mostly favourable public notice in its first ten years, but maintaining a cuddly, anticorporate image when it stands among the US companies with the largest market capitalisation may pose an increasingly difficult challenge”
I’ve just covered Stross’ introduction to 'Planet Google' in this blog. I’ll start on chapter one, ”Open and Closed”, tomorrow.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher December 10, 2008 5:10 PM | Comments (0)