Google Study Case

Inc. has become one most respectable, most used and popular search engines from our time. Before computers and Internet came to an existence communication was mainly done in writing through magazines, books, letters and telegraphs. Nowadays, all you need is the tip of your finger to communicate across the globe. Soon enough just like medieval times Globalization was catapulted into our generation via Internet and Google is one of its main entrées. Their mission: According to their official website is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while studying at Stanford University in 1995. By 1996, they had created a search engine (originally named BackRub) that used links to identify the importance of single webpages. Not surprisingly by 1998, Google was up and running. The secret behind Google's success is its ability to fuse together its technology with its web advertising. Google's main strategy was to expand its reign across new foreign markets. By 2007 Internet users were able to use the Google search engine in almost 120 languages while available in almost 160 domains. Any query originated outside United States would automatically assume a tailored domain such as google.co.uk. By August 2007, Google skyrocketed as the top worldwide search property with a 37.1 billion of searches. However, Google seemed to have forgotten that with great power comes great responsibility. Its rapid dominance throughout web and across the world would soon incite concerns in a number of countries especially France, Germany and Japan. Following are detailed the struggles that these countries and Google itself have gone through in order to stay afloat in this flood of new technologies.

How does a search engine work? What is the exportability of a search engine's technology and business model?

Search engines work by scanning web pages for key words. Results are accumulated and sorted by relevance and popularity. This process is based on an algorithm, and the results are never hand edited. Google specifically utilizes PageRank technology. Paid results (companies that pay for keywords) appear in a separate section than all other results.

Exportability describes how generic a product is as well as how easily it can be customized to fit consumer needs. Google's search engine technology is exportable, but may be difficult to customize in some regions. Customization depends on the language and culture in the target country. For example, Google included three dialects when expanding to France: Breton, Basque, and Corsican. Not only was the expansion to France a large and costly project, but setting up search engines for three essentially different languages created an additional three large and costly projects.

The search engine technology is exportable, but once the expansion is made, Google needs to customize the technology to fit the local languages and cultures.

Why did many governments appear threatened by Google? How did they counter this threat?

Many governments appeared threatened