Google's Popularity

Google - the top search engine and website according to Alexa.com – draws about 38% of web traffic and has numerous other websites that rely on it for search technology, including sites like Ask.com and Webcrawler.com. Google survived the dot.com bust of 1999 and went public in 2004, reporting a 2003 profit of about $107 million. The stock price was at $548 on November 5, 2009.

The Google page, unlike Yahoo! or AOL, shows no flashing pictures, but the company has purchased a video site, YouTube.com. The basic search page has the colorful Google logo that is supplemented with amusing drawings and users can select from a variety of searches: Images, News, Maps, Videos and Shopping.

A variety of other functions have been added over the years. Gmail is the free Google email service; Google Groups is for user groups on subjects ranging from Arts to Science/Technology; Google Books is essentially a library of online books; Google Scholar is an index of peer-reviewed papers and academic publications; Google Blogs is a blog index. The website includes many other free things as well: Google Chrome is a browser for surfing the web; Google custom search is a search box that can be placed on a website; Google Finance provides financial news; Picasa is a photo sharing feature; and Google Toolbar allows users to add a search box to a browser.

Google has inspired an entire language. “Google it” means to search for a term using the Google search engine. “Google News” is the news index for Google. As mentioned, “You Tube” is the name of the video site where users load and download videos. “Google Apps” is a set of Google applications including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Documents.

Search engines represent a different way of finding info than the Orwellian days of broadcast and cable TV. TV news sources were limited to a few in the case of broadcast and a dozen or so in the case of cable, but Google users have thousands of sources for news when blogs and information web pages are considered. It complicates greatly the state’s efforts to control information, as witnessed by China’s efforts to control information, which have included the draconian measure of shutting down websites that criticized the regime.

Despite some setbacks abroad, Google continues to lead the field.