How Google Became a Successful Company

ProdUXt Manager
7 min readApr 17, 2020

The Story behind Google: A remarkable tech giant in the world

Google is a remarkable company. I have massive respect for them on two levels.

Level One:

Their ability to explode into the Tech Giant but on another level, I respect them for what they’ve done for the world. They’ve made all our lives just a little bit better in more ways than you realize.

Level Two:

Their business is strategized in a way that benefits all parties (Google, Publishers, and Users) in ways that wouldn’t even be possible without the structure that Google has set in place.

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How Google Started:

Two Ph.D. students — Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google at Stanford University in 1998. The company has since expanded into many other areas, but in the beginning, it was precisely what we most know it as a “search engine”. The two initially called it back rub. You could tell, they weren’t marketing majors. The name quickly became Google.

How Google was named:

Google as a number is 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s spelled differently, but that’s the origin of the name. It’s their smart way of saying that you’re going to get a ton of search results.

Here are the different logos of google over a period of time.

Google logo over a period of time

Google and its Competitor:

When Google was started, there were a few other search engines around at the time. The biggest of which was Yahoo and Excite, but it only took five years for Google to surpass Yahoo and every other competitor by 2003. Almost 40% of all people searching for things on the Internet would go to Google.

Finally, it was time, when people stopped searching for things and started googling things.

How & Why Google surpassed everyone:

Google surpasses everyone so quickly because people were happier with the results they were getting.

If you want to know how Google search engines work, you’re in the wrong article because it’s complicated. But what other search engines were doing at that time was scanning pages for words you typed in and the top results would be pages where those words appear most often which would sometimes produce strange results.

Google had a more sophisticated system that determined how relevant the results were and it would more commonly display things that people wanted.

Google Current Competitor in Market:

Google market share has grown steadily since the beginning, but in 2009 Microsoft launched a direct competitor called Bing.

It was heavily advertised during its launched and had many people convinced that it might be better than Google, but it’s yet to grow anywhere near Google status.

In my opinion, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was naming it after Chandler’s last name. :) It wasn’t accurately named after him it was named after nothing just something that tasted well and is easy to remember.

It’s supposed to represent the sound of discovery. Bing is currently the second most popular search engine, but it’s a distant second. The reality is that Google was already so perfected and polished that it’s hard for a new search engine to get to that level.

In a short period, Google has tremendous search queries on their hands.

How Google Make Money?

We don’t pay them any money to use it. If they had charged a subscription or per-user fee, we would all switch right over to Bing or Yahoo, and the company would crumble. So, they’re forced to generate their revenue through advertising, and this is the pure genius of Google’s business model.

Look at Google’s revenue over the past five years. We can take two things from this one is that Google has been growing like crazy almost doubling in revenue over this period, but the other thing we can make from it is that Google generates typically around 90% of the income from advertising and this surprised me.

Here’s what separates them from other companies. There are two separate parts to the system; Google calls them Google Ads and Google Adsense.

1. Google Ads

Whenever you search on Google, you may have seen these little sponsored results. These little ads come in the search query when the company pay for a specific search query.

For example, I will search for “sponsored ads google”. The top two results are paid.

When you search for something, you may not have even realized those were paid. For example, when someone seeks the word — “Nike shoes”. It will show the sponsored query and then the organic results. This ranking of ads works on the bids and auction.

So, let’s take a look at the parties involved and benefiting. The first one of them is Google who is benefiting through visible means. The second one is a retailer or brand that is paying for the ads. The third one is the person viewing the advertisement, who is seeing an ad for something they’re interested in.

Most ads we see on TV are the one which we don’t want to see, but most of the ads we see on Googling queries are the one which we want to. and if you don’t just scroll past the inconvenience is so minimal that many people didn’t even realize they just saw an ad at all.

Google Ads is advertising at its most excellent it’s bringing together the seller and the customer in a way that’s easy and helpful to both ends all while pocketing a healthy profit themselves.

2. Google Adsense

The other part of Google’s advertising is Adsense which is a little more sketchy but still great.

Adsense is used on many blogs and sites including YouTube. When Google acquired YouTube, it was a perfect match. There were many eyes on YouTube videos, but it was hard to make money from it. Ads needed to be placed around these videos to make them profitable, and Google had the perfect system for it. They’re mostly the middleman between the content creators and the advertisers. When working correctly, the ads are placed around the appropriate videos.

With Google Ad-sense, bloggers, podcasters, and you tubers could make money, and advertisers can have their ads shown hopefully on the appropriate websites, videos.

It’s a fantastic system, and when it’s working correctly, again, it benefits all parties. The Google benefit is obvious, and the publisher also can make money as long as they get the views.

Conclusion:

Overall, you’re helping it all function. So, Google makes a ton of money and does it in a way that benefits everybody.

They are one of the few companies that I would say have changed the world. The average person may disagree with that statement and say that all they did was make it a little easier to search for things on the internet. But we know that they’ve done so much more than that.

They’ve revolutionized advertising as we know it most people view ads as a necessary evil, but Google has found ways to take the evil part out of it such as YouTube Premium.

There’s a whole portion of Google that I didn’t even mention Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth and a ton of cell phone-related stuff. But when it comes down, advertising is the heart of the company, and it’s what truly separates them from everybody else.

Let me know in the comments any thoughts you have on Google or anything else mentioned in the article. I’d like to hear what you have to say.

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ProdUXt Manager

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