Google
A saga of Innovation

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continued from: A saga of Innovation

Since its inception, Google has been successful in giving its competitors a run for their money. In a short span of time, Google has become the best search engine by eating into the market share of Yahoo and other players. Its innovative strategy to generate revenue by placing advertisements on sites which contain information related to those ads has indeed made Google highly profitable. As if that was not enough; a year ago, Google surprised everyone by announcing the launch of Gmail, its email service, with a massive storage space of 1GB. Gmail, which was launched on 1st April 2004, was quite successful in attracting users of Yahoo and Hotmail.

More than a search engine

Though Google is a Linux based search engine, it is supported by any browser i.e. Internet Explorer or Netscape. When Google entered the online search market, Yahoo was the market leader. Yahoo, the most popular portal, offered services such as news updates, search results, and email services. The founders of Google, Page and Brin, wanted to make Google an innovative search engine. Their relentless efforts towards that objective proved fruitful as, in a span of 5 years, Google became successful by placing itself ahead of Yahoo in the search engine market. In the year 2001, Google even came up with search technology for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled phones and other handheld devices. As years passed by, the company went adding new features for its users thus emerging as the world's no.1 search engine. Table I explains the list of features offered by Google. In 2002, Google pioneered the concept of Ad Words and Ad Sense, and thus created a sensation in the field of online advertising (Refer Exhibit II).

Table I
Google Web Search Features

• Book Search - New!	Use Google to search the full text of books.
• Cached Links	View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
• Calculator	Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
• Definitions	Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.
• File Types	Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.
• Froogle	To find a product for sale online, use Froogle - Google's product search service.
• I'm Feeling Lucky	Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.
• Local Search	Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
• Movies - New!	Use Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you.
• News Headlines	Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.
• PhoneBook	Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.
• Q&A - New!	Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
• Results Prefetching - New!	Makes searching in Firefox faster.
• Search By Number	Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.
• Similar Pages	Display pages that are related to a particular result.
• Site Search	Restrict your search to a specific site.
• Spell Checker	Offers alternative spelling for queries.
• Stock Quotes - New!	Use Google to get live stock quotes and information.
• Street Maps	Use Google to find U.S. street maps.
• Travel Information	Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.
• Weather - New!	Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.
• Web Page Translation	Provides English speakers access to a variety of non-English web pages.
• Who Links To You?	Find pages that point to a specific URL.