Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is undoubtedly among the world’s most influential companies. The phenomenal rise of the internet giant has been an eventful one, filled with various hits and misses. In 1997, the founders of Google offered to sell the company to Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) for a sum of US$1 billion. Yahoo turned down the offer, and the rest is history. Today the market CAP of Google is a massive 10 times larger than Yahoo. After the year 2000, Google made various algorithmic changes to the search engine and added a host of new features.
Despite large investments in upcoming technologies, 95% of the company’s revenue comes from advertising. The company still has a long way to despite the massive influence it has on the internet. During the company’s latest fiscal Q1 fiscal results investors expressed fears of Google’s declining presence in the mobile advertising segment, which is increasingly being targeted by Facebook Inc.(NASDAQ:FB). Google’s most visible entry in the smartphone segment is the Android OS, which had a market share of 80% among all smartphone operating systems in 2013. However, concerns are arising on whether Google still has control of the Android OS, which is an indirect key source – placing Google services on all Android phones – of revenue for the company. Google’s profit margin has been relatively flat since 2011 but revenue has been on an upward trajectory.
It’s hard to imagine today’s world without the Google search engine, whose algorithm has been updated several times to incorporate new features and modifications. This infographic from reviewzap.com showcases all of Google’s highlights through the years:
- The official website GOOGLE.COM was registered in 1997. Google Images was launched in 2001.
- Google Suggest feature was added in August 2008, to display additional suggestions based on user comments. Google Instant followed afterwards in September 2010.
- The latest update to the search engine algorithm was the Hummingbird in September 2013. Its main goal was to answer more complex questions effectively.
- Â Gmail was launched in 2004, and is now the most widely used e-mail service with almost 425 million active users.
- YouTube was purchased in 2006, and now 100 hours of videos are being uploaded on YouTube every minute.
- The Google search engine handles almost 3.5 billion queries every day. To understand this value, 1 KJ of energy is required to process every search query.
- The size of the Google Index is a mind-boggling 100 million GB.
