Google - A Saga of Innovation

            

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Authors: S.Ramakrishna & Sanjib Dutta,
Research Associate, Senior Faculty Member,
ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).

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More than a Search Engine Contd...

Now, Google is much more than a search engine. Apart from searching information and answering queries, Google has been offering various features for its users. It has become an ocean of knowledge and information on the web. Recently, it has partnered with world's top most universities like Harvard, Oxford and some others to digitize their libraries. It has acquired Keyhole Corporation - a map service provider, for Geographical Information System (GIS) applications.

Its other new features include Froogle - which compares prices of various products, Picassa - which organizes the photos based on their format, and Gmail - the revolutionary email service. In order to increase the number of users, Google kept adding new features like Google Toolbar1 and Google Deskbar2. The company has even gone to the extent of offering enterprise businesses a paid search tool 'Google Mini', for their intranet users. The latest news is Google is offering personalized web pages for its users.

With more and more features being introduced, Google is increasing its revenues (Refer Exhibit III).

The company's net profits for the quarter ended March'05 are $369.2mn with the sales of $1.26bn in comparison with net profit of $64mn and sales of $651.6mn for the same quarter in the previous year. This, company officials say, is a result of increased search on its sites and increase in advertising revenue. Antony Savvos, editor-ComputerWeekly.com, explains, "Google's results reflect a rapidly developing commercial search market, which is currently estimated to be worth around $5bn a year. The company is the market leader. Google's success has spurred the likes of Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo into developing their own commercial search offerings."3

Exhibit III
Google's Revenues

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1] A downloadable toolbar for Internet Explorer that allows a user to do a Google search without visiting the Google website.
2] Runs locally on a PC and enables desktop search, indexes all office documents, explorer files, pdf files, music and video files and allows the user to search them from the browser.
3] "Google's profits soar", 2nd February 2005, www.computerweekly.com.