Google Analysis

Industry Analysis

Google started when online information is expanding and the need for a better search engine is growing. At the time, searching is perceived by many businesses as a peripheral activity and consumers would not care if they have easy access to information. The concept of mass marketing was being used to advertise on the existing search engines with little targeting mechanism.

Mission Statement

“Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful”

This statement is a very ambitious mission for Google but it also leaves many doors of opportunity opened for Google. Their recent acquisitions and projects cover many areas. Information comes from many sources and online information is only a very limited part of it. Google started out with online information and is growing into offline channels. Information from multiple sources has many different formats. For example: different file types, images, audio files, paper books, and so on. Thus, the big picture is chaotic and unorganized. Making information useful and universally accessible also include online searches as well as from other sources such as wireless and voice searches. The presentation of the search result is also important. The most relevant results should be at the top of the list for ease of access.

Business Goals

• To organize the world’s information, Google started with searching information from online websites and is expanding into other media types.
• Universally accessible ability means whatever, whenever and wherever the users need the information.
• Create the network effect, try to deliver an excellent product to attract more users and profitability will be much easier to obtain.

Value Proposition

1. For Consumers: most other engines at the period of 1998 were focusing on the repetition of certain keywords within a page to determine its importance for those keywords. Google took a different approach and considers an important page as a page with references from other important pages. With this concept, PageRank was invented to rank which pages should appear first on the long list of results. The idea of more relevant pages come first make searches for information quicker and consumers enjoy the accuracy of Google.
2. For Publishers: the ability to earn money for display targeted text advertisements on their websites. Ads are targeted to the content of the site and are considered as added benefits to online visitors rather than annoying distractions.
3. For Advertisers: advertising dollars spent on the right prospects, conversion rate is much higher than the traditional mass advertising.