HiFi Geek

HEADQUARTERS OF GOOGLE

“The Googolplex” is the headquarters of Google in California which means a googolplex being 1010100, or a one followed by a googol of zeros as the HQ is a complex of buildings. The lobby has a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters and projection of search queries on the wall with the hallways full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee can access the corporate recreation center. 

Recreational amenities are scattered through the campus including workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, a baby grand piano, a pool table and ping pong, the recording room, snack rooms with various foods and drinks. Google moved into 311,000 square feet of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave in Manhattan designed and built for Google housing its largest advertising sales team that was instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL.

 They added an engineering staff in New York City responsible for more than 100 engineering projects including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets etc. The building costs Google US$10 million per year as rent and has similar design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables and video game area. 

The size of search system is undisclosed. The site referred by the media as Project 02, was chosen for the availability of inexpensive hydroelectric power and large surplus of fiber optic cable. The computing center is the size of two football field that has created hundreds of construction jobs, causing local real estate prices to increase 40%. Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. The company had announced to install thousands of solar panels to provide upto 1.6 megawatts of electricity, to satisfy approx. 30% of the campus’ energy needs. The system is the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and the largest on any corporate site in the world.

SOFTWARE USED BY GOOGLE

Google shows a maximum of 1000 results for a specific search result through keywords and operators. It even provides you with it web search technology into search services of Web search, Image search, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps etc etc.

Google has also launched it email service called Gmail.com that features spam filtering, uses Google’s technology to search an email. They have generated income by ads, displaying Ad Words service tailored to user’s choice and the content of the user’s email messages on the screen.

The Google has also launched a video software allowing you to search and view the videos as well as you can publish your content like television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos.

Google also has unlimited desktop applications of Google desktop, Picas a, Sketch up and Google Earth.

It is rumored that Google will soon release its phone in competition to the iPhone through a project called “Android” that provides a kit allowing an “Android” phone to run software developed for Android SDK.

Google released Google Chrome that was an open source web browser.

ENTERPRISE OF GOOGLE

Google launched its Google Search Appliance and thus, entered the enterprise market that provided the search technology to organizations that were large and for the smaller ones, it launched Mini.

Google sold Custom search business edition to provide the customers with ad free window in Google.com’s index and re branded its search edition as Google Site Search.

Google even launched Google Apps Premier Edition including more disk space, API access and support for US%50 a year for one user.

CORPORATE AFFAIRS OF GOOGLE

Google has relaxed corporate cultures with its playful variations on its corporate logo and the magazine of Fortune listed it in the 100 top best places to work as it woks on the principles of making money without evil, be serious without a suit and work should be challenging and challenge should be fun. It has, at the same time having low salaries. Though, its early employees have been compensated by participating in the company’s equity growth.

ACHEIVEMENTS OF GOOGLE

Though their main interest is in web arena but still, Google experimented with other radio and print publications that allows Google to combine the Internet and radio by laser-focusing on consumers’ preferences. Along with this, Google also sold advertisements in offline newspapers and magazines and have filled unsold space in the newspaper normally been used for in-house advertisements.

Google launched “Ad sense for Mobile” that is a service for its partners so that they can monetize their mobile sites through placement of text ads of mobiles.

BUYING OTHER SITES

Google has done a lot of acquisitions with many companies that are as under:

Google had acquired a company called “Keyhole, Inc.” that developed a product “Earth Viewer” later renamed by Google as Google Earth in 2005.

A measure map was sold by a software company Adaptive Path that was a statistics application to Google. Though, the registration to this service has been temporarily disabled since 6th April 2006.

Google acquired the site “You Tube for a price of US$1.65 billion in stock and also revealed that it had even acquired Jot Spot that developed the WiKi technology for collaborative sites.

Google had also bought Double-Click for US$3.1 billion.

Google had also signed a contract to buy up enterprise messaging security and Posting.

Google also acquired the site of mobile networking called Zingku.mobi so that it could provide people with worldwide access directly to Google applications with the result that the information that they need and want was retrieved by the mobile devices.

COLLABORATIONS WITH OTHER COMPANIES

Google entered into a contract with NASA Ames Research Center for building 1000000 square feet of offices and work on projects having large scale data management, distributed computing, nanotechnology and space industry.

Google entered into collaboration with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute technologies of one another.

To enhance their video services, the company even went in partnership with AOL of Time Warner.

Google invested in .mobi that is a top domain for mobiles, in junction with many companies like Microsoft, Nokia and Ericsson.

Google entered into contract with Fox Media of News Corporation for a sum of US$900 million so that they cold provide search and advertise on the social networking site, MySpace.

It developed a partnership with GeoEye so that they could get a satellite with high resolution imagery.