Google Swot

        Technology has played a vital role in today’s world.  From shopping to emailing, the World Wide Web has become part of our daily lives and to a certain extent has become a necessity.  Before the World Wide Web, the internet really only provided full of text, usually only in one font and font size.  However, many people found it boring because t only gave access to information.  As a result, companies such as CompuServe and AOL developed what was called GUIs, which added a bit of color and layout to the webpage.  Although this format was useful, it wasn’t attractive to many users.  Throughout the years, the World Wide Web went thru some significant changes from creating URLs to having its first browser in 1993.  In 1994, there were over a million browser copies in use.  From 1994 to 2000, the Internet saw massive growth and this is when the internet era began.  This is when the first search engines began to appear, which didn’t take long for Google to come into the spotlight.  

        Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
        However, since the launching of their search engine in 1998, Google has had a numerous of competitors who have desperately tried to offer the same services as Google.   Companies such as Yahoo! Inc., AlltheWeb, Microsoft Corporation and LookSmart are a few of the many companies who believe that one day they will be just as successful as Google.  Each of these competitors has its unique strategic plan against Google Inc. For example, Teoma (Gaelic for "expert") offers input from specialized sites created by experts. (>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>) According to the article “Thrill of hunt lures Google competitors” in USAToday by Jefferson Graham, Wisenut (owned by Look Smart which also supplies search technology to MSN) helps users with multiple ways to reword their searches to come up with better results (USAToday). Alltheweb.com counters Google by providing specific search engines for MP3s, video and photographs on its little-advertised technology showcase site (USAToday).
One of the key external competitive characteristics of Google is its entirely new algorithm for determining keyword relevance – PageRank, which is a way of searching a webpage hypertext rather than the text itself.  According to an article written by web design expert, by analyzing these links Google effectively harnesses every web publisher not just to provide the content for the encyclopedia, but to rank every site and page on the Web for its index  (Designer-Info). The PageRank technology first finds the web pages with user’s keyword then ranks the results according to "votes" that have built up over the time the page has existed on the Internet.  Furthermore, Google ranks the importance of the pages that cast the votes, and those ranked as most important are given more weight. Rankings are also influenced by the prominence of keywords on pages found, based on factors like typeface.