M.zhairf[case Study On Google]

CASE STUDY ON GOOGLE (MODULE: NAVIGATION)

MUHAMAD ZHARIF MUHAMMAD SHUIB QGA080007

ASIA EUROPE INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY MALAYA

OCTOBER 2008

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN THE DIGITAL AND GLOBAL ECONOMY

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ABSTRACT

This paper is to discuss Google and its style of information management in the digital and global economy. Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. [Source: Google, Inc.]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract

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List of Figures

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1.0

Question Related to Case Study 1.1

What is the core tenet of Google's strategy to dominate

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the field of search engine? 1.2

How is Google different from other major search engines?

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1.3

What is PageRank? Why it might produce more effective

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results from searching a large index? What are limitations this approach? 1.4

What kind of business model(s) does Google use?

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1.5

In what ways does the selected organization exemplify the

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ways in which the digital and global economy offers new opportunities for doing business? 1.6

What are a) the main challenges and b) the main

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opportunities that are faced by organization? 1.7

What information management strategies does the

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organization exemplifies? How would you assess these strategies? 1.8

How do you think the CIO or equivalent of the chosen Organization would have responded to the Top Ten Issues Survey from the MISQE?

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References

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.0 : Google’s results for a search on taxes Figure 2.0 : Results for a search on taxes performed at yahoo.com. Figure 3.0 : Results for a search on taxes performed at myway.com.

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1.0 Question Related to Case Study 1.1

What is the core tenet of Google's strategy to dominate the field of search engines?

To dominate the field of search engine, Google has emphasized on their unique code called Google Code of Conduct in their everyday business activities. This is important to maintain the high standard of their business in that field. "Don't be evil." Googlers generally concern those words to how they give out their users. But "Don't be evil" is much more than that. It is true that it is about given that their users balanced access to information, focusing on their requests and giving them the best products and services that they can. But it's also about doing the right thing more generally, that’s mean, following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect. The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways they put "Don't be evil" into practice. It's built around the recognition that everything they do in connection with their work at Google will be, and should be, deliberated against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. They set the bar that high for practical as well as encouraging reasons: They hire great people who work hard to build immense products, and it's fundamental that they build an environment of trust – among themselves and with their users. That trust and mutual respect trigger their success, and they need to produce it everyday. Basically, Google expect all of their employees and board of members to know and follow that unique Code. Failure to do so can result in disciplinary action, including termination of employment. Moreover, while the Code is specifically written for Google employees and board of members, they expect Google contractors, consultants and others who may be temporarily assigned to perform work or services for Google to follow the Code in connection with their work for them. Failure of a Google contractor or consultant

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or other covered service provider to follow the Code can result in termination of their relationship with Google. 1.2

How is Google different from other major search engines?

Google not only about unpaid editorial results, but the company also operates its own advertising programs. The cost-per-click AdWords program places ads on Google as well as some of Google's partners. Similarly, Google is also a provider of unpaid editorial results to some other search engines. Besides that, Google can also be different from other major search engines with those elements discussed below:  Crawling

Google is also more efficient at crawling than competing engines. This is because it appears as though with Google's BigDaddy update they are looking at both inbound and outbound link quality to help set crawl priority, crawl depth, and weather or not a site even gets crawled at all. To quote Matt Cutts: The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the in links or the out links of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.  Link Reputation

PageRank is a weighted measure of link popularity, but Google's search algorithms have moved far beyond just looking at PageRank. As mentioned above, gaining an excessive number of low quality links may hurt the capacity to get indexed in Google, so users need to stay away from known spammy link exchange hubs and other sources of junk links. Google is much improved at being able to determine the difference between real editorial citations and low quality, spammer, bought or artificial links.

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 Web sites versus search engines It is important for us to emphasize on the distinction between the use of a search engine on the search engine’s own Web site (e.g. Google at google.com) versus a visit to a portal site that allows users to perform searches using the search engine of another company (e.g. use of Google’s search engine at yahoo.com). Portal sites often contract with other companies to perform their searches. See Figure 1 for a screen shot of a search on taxes at google.com.

Figure 1: Google’s results for a search on taxes. The user does not encounter the exact same results on other sites powered by Google’s search technology. Yahoo, for example, inserts a list of its own sponsored recommendations before displaying results from the search engine’s database. See Figure 2 for a screen shot of a search on taxes at yahoo.com.

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Figure 2: Results for a search on taxes performed at yahoo.com. MyWay places AdWord items, that is, pay–per–click content in the main body of results ahead of the regular Google results list (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Results for a search on taxes performed at myway.com, which is powered by Google. Although Google’s search engine may be powering all of these searches, it would be problematic to argue that the results are identical. Google’s search engine may be more well-liked by being used on all of these sites, but its use on the different sites leads to

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different results not because Google itself is returning different links, but because its results are being mixed with other content depending on the hosting site’s own preferences. 1.3

What is PageRank? Why might it produce more effective results from searching a large index? What are the limitations of this approach?

Basically, PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR (E). Chapter 1The Benefits of Having High PR Websites The term “PageRank” or “PR” is often considering as one of the most important elements that judge website ranking in several webmasters mind. It has a value of 0 to 10, and 10 being the most highly ranked sites. Many webmasters are preoccupied with improving their website’s PR value. A website with high PR value will allow webmaster to benefits the most in return. See below: 1. According to Google’s Page Rank Algorithm Technology: “Page Rank reflects Google view of the influence of web pages by taking into consideration more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believe are imperative pages receive a higher Page Rank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.” 2. Googlebot crawls a high PR website more often. It helps fresh content and links to be shown faster in the search engine and indexed. Not only that, If a webmaster who has other new websites that linked to user own high PR website, it will help new-fangled websites been crawled by Googlebot more frequently and better the new websites in search engine results.

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Limitations of this PageRank approach It is must be noted that it is easy to spoof PageRank. While the PageRank shown in the Toolbar is considered to be derived from a precise PageRank value (at some time prior to the time of publication by Google) for most sites, this value is also easily manipulated. A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a "Refresh" meta tag, to a high PageRank page causes the lower PageRank page to acquire the PageRank of the destination page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This spoofing technique, also known as 302 Google Jacking, is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page's PageRank can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster's choice and only Google has access to the real PageRank of the page. Spoofing is generally detected by running a Google search for a URL with questionable PageRank, as the results will display the URL of an entirely different site (the one redirected to) in its results. 1.4

What kind of business model(s) does Google use?

Google apply Advertising method (Query-based Paid Placement) as their business model. They sells favorable link positioning (i.e., sponsored links) or advertising keyed to particular search terms in a user query, such as Overture's trademark "pay-forperformance" model. Google also is the pioneer in Content-Targeted Advertising where they extend the precision of search advertising to the rest of the web. Google identifies the meaning of a web page and then automatically delivers relevant ads when a user visits that page. Another example in advertising method used by Google is AdWords. It is the system that serves up the text ads that are viewed alongside search results. Advertisers associate their ads with keywords that appear in searches. Google uses an auction-based system for its AdWords product that allows advertisers to bid on each keyword to define how much they will pay for a click on their ad.

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Besides that, Google also transform its business model. Google is no longer just a search engine company. That is evident from its expansion into many additional offerings for both consumers (Picasa, Blogger, Keyhole, Gmail, and other small features, along with rumors of a browser) and enterprise (primarily search). Market/Value chain positioning Google is expanding its area of participation in the value chain. In other words, its search technology and infrastructure is merely a utility that allows it to do what really bring over 90% revenue and income - advertising. Google can be called as an advertising company, simply because it is the only company that allows any business to start advertising online without any need for professional copy writers or graphic designers or help from any advertising salesperson. Offering bundle While Google has not figured out ways to monetize everything (e.g. Google news), its bundle keeps growing and it is not be surprised if it did come up with a very innovative approach to monetizing some of its offerings (Gmail has a very powerful model). In other words, its pipeline is full. Some say Google doesn't improve its search results by removing spam pages because Google earns money from the ads that run on some of these pages. Others say their websites were removed from Google's index (or penalized) to buy AdWords ads. But Google's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote something even harsher in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998): "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and

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risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

1.5

In what ways does the selected organization exemplify the ways in which the digital and global economy offers new opportunities for doing business?

So, here Google stand alone in developing the digital technology called “perfect search engine”. Larry Page (2004) describes technology is “meant to understand exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want”. By all means, they come out with the flourishing story where they develop digital technology with a serving infrastructure and penetrate PageRank™ that changed the way searches are succeed. Google demonstrate the digital and global economy with new opportunities for doing business by introducing approach more likely laissez faire toward innovation, espousal new ideas plus products time life before the management records out how everything related to the business fits into the industry plan. “In some businesses process, the salespeople usually tell the engineers what to do, but at Google, engineers within engineering team are really our driving force". Marissa Mayer (2005). Google take full opportunity in getting the best outcome in doing business. This can be proven as of August 2007; Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%). Google has billions of indexes of web pages, so that users can search for the information they wish for, all the way through the exploit of keywords and operators.

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One thing best about Google is, they certainly come with the intention to grab whatever opportunity comes into their way. In early 2006, the company starts on Google Video, which not only consent to users to explore and view freely available videos but also recommends consumer and media publishers the facility to publish their content, including television shows on tennis, NBA basketball games, football match and music videos. In August 2007, Google announced that it would shut down its video rental and sale program and offer refunds and Google Checkout credits to consumers who had purchased videos to own. 1.6

What are a) the main challenges and b) the main opportunities that are faced by the organization?

As company like Google increased of size of staff, the world wide competition from great mainstream technology is always the main threat for them. The arch rival of Google, Microsoft has been flaunting its MSN Search engine to counter Google’s competitive position. In addition, both of companies are all the time more offering overlapping services for instance the web mail. Google has its own Gmail whilst Microsoft own Hotmail. Not only that, they compete in full intensity in doing other application such as search (both local desktop searching and online) and mapping (Microsoft’s Virtual Earth competes with Google Earth). Several have even buzzed that in addition to an Internet Explorer proxy Google is designing its own Linux operating system which called Google OS to unswervingly compete with Microsoft Windows. The anecdote of a Google browser is fueled by the reality that Google is the owner of the domain name “gbrowser.com”. Even as Google is still “numero uno” of search engine, the company needs to have a great effort to keep up pace with their closest rivals such as well known Yahoo. Even though Yahoo and Google differ very much in the services they proffer, Google is still trying to redefine itself from an Internet search company to an Internet media company. All of the above, Google is trying to achieve something special that is to become a jack of all buy and sell for the internet. They come into

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other businesses and burst what ever opportunity even other companies have dominated it before. The main opportunity that faced by the organization is how make a vast of profit in doing business in digital and global commerce. And this come with their expertise in Information Technology where the first-class strategy helps them to become a prodigy in the web services all time. Google is one and only. This power house in web service not only because it’s thinking is original and its applications unique, but because the company's exceptional IT strategy makes it so. Services hardware and free software barely seem like the seeds of a realm, yet Google has twisted them into an unparalleled disseminated computing platform that chains its passionately popular search engine, plus an up-and-coming number of applications. We used to call them end user applications, but Google changed that. Businesses also use them because, well, Google is different. There's a lesson in Google's IT philosophy for other companies: avoid the herding instinct that leads toward the same systems and software everyone else is using. There may well be competitive advantages in doing things your own way. As Douglas Merrill (2005) describes “culture drives the way you do things, to the extent, like us, your organizational culture is unusual in important ways, you will have to build different ways of running your traditional systems.” Another opportunity basically about how Google could provide an incentive for newspapers and bloggers to do more original reporting rather than just rehashing previously published reports. Google has an appealing prospect to help deal with these problems. Google grants most of the search hits that take people to these pirate sites, and it also places most of the ads that bound the pirated content. There are a variety of methods that Google could act of kindness the original creators and difficulty the pirates. Google could positively know what pages contain new content; it could identify the pirate sites and not simply reprimand them in its rankings but simply cut them off. Google could get that knowledge by having a recognized business relationship with the content suppliers.

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1.7

What information management strategies does the organization exemplify? How would you assess these strategies?

Google main focus is on the user. From the beginning, Google has focused on strategy on how providing the best user experience possible. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site:  The interface is clear and simple.  Pages load instantly.  Position in search results is never sold to anyone.  Marketing on the site must offer applicable content and not be a diversion. By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another. Nevertheless, what about wisdom at a more tactical level? Can businesses at least represent some constructive lessons from the way Google approaches the intricate process of business strategy? The answer is “yes” and “no”. Google’s achievement and gain mammoth profits can be described with three styles of innovations: the first a luminous approaching into the organization of information, the second an inspired act of reproduction and the third a burst through in the engineering of computer systems. The company’s founding inspiration was produced by Page and Brin in early 1996 when they become conscious that Web search engines were extremely blemished. In ranking results for a keyword search, long-established engines looked primarily at the content of Web pages, adding up, for instance, the number of times the keyword appeared. Links, they grasped, were the Web’s edition of votes: add them up and you’d get a clear picture of the significance and value of sites. The better results received by Google quickly drew the attention of Web surfers, and in short order it became the central search engine. But serving up gratis search consequences is not, in itself, much of a business model. And that

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brings us to the second critical innovation: the growth of a public sale to sell ads connected to search results. 1.8

How do you think the CIO or equivalent of the chosen organization would have responded to the Top Ten Issues Survey from the MISQE? 1. Attracting, Developing, and Retaining IT Professionals.

In today’s dynamic business and technical environments, organizations need both experienced professionals and new hires to have the appropriate balance of skills. As CIO or equivalent at Google Company, the way of respond is Google understanding the mix of skills that is required, in defining an appropriate sourcing strategy, and in retaining the critical talent the organization currently has. This concern appear important to Google since this group of corporate warfare has been become aware in most directly expressed especially in case of hiring tender and deflections. Employees from Microsoft who worked on Internet Explorer have left to work for Google company. This dispute heated over into the courts when former vice-president of Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee resign from Microsoft and join Google. Microsoft begins their move by take legal action to stop his shift by mentioning Lee’s non-compete contract. Why Microsoft worry is because of Lee has so much information access to what Microsoft plan in China. 2. IT and Business Alignment It is interesting that Google has exactly removed all position to wikis in its narrative of Google Sites, at a time when many project software vendors are clamoring to make certain their offerings at least reference Enterprise 2.0 terms such as "wikis" and "blogs". This is the right decision: the Google Sites offering, while far from being a stylish site design instrument, is much broader than many wiki tools in the market. It will also help Google in its attempt to "cross over" into the enterprise market - despite the success of business-focused products like Google Search Appliance; Google is still very much an Internet brand. While wikis and blogs are very "now", they are far from established in the enterprise, and the terminology can alienate less tech-savvy business users. Google needs

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to create confidence and trust among the enterprise market, and this branding/marketing decision seems to reflect this. 3. Build Business Skills in IT IT person nowadays must have good business skills in IT and need to improve their expertise in order to get the better place for working with better payment. The most important part the Google looking at is at sales and marketing skills - Establishing successful sales and marketing methods and policies - from pricing and advertising to sales techniques - are essential in growing business. The ability to analyze competition, the marketplace, and industry trends are critical to the development of your marketing strategy. The key is to know how to craft and communicate a compelling message to the right target audience that generates new business, and in turn, builds profitable revenue streams. 4. Reduce the cost of Doing business Google defied the global economic downturn and delivered another strong set of profits in the third quarter of the year thanks to strict cost-cutting measures and strong advertising revenue. The notoriously free-spending California-based company tightened its belt, pushing revenue up by 31% despite the escalating financial turmoil. Internet surfers clicking on advertisements helped to drive the firm's profits up 26%. Google, which already has more than 70% of US search advertising spending, is looking to spur growth through new advertising strategies with possible opportunities in the videosharing site, YouTube. Analysts are broadly confident about Google's growth prospects for the coming years. 5. Improve IT quality From the beginning, Google developers documented that on condition that the fastest, most accurate results requisite a new kind of server system. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of huge servers that often slowed under hit the highest point loads, Google employed linked PCs to quickly find each query's answer. The advance paid off in

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more rapidly reply times, superior scalability and minor costs. It's an idea that others have since copied, while they have continued to refine their back-end technology to make it even more proficient. The software behind technology conducts a sequence of concurrent calculations requiring only a division of a second. Conventional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google use more than 200 signals, including patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, they able to put the most relevant and reliable results first. 6. Security and Privacy To put it simply, Google does not own user data. They do not take an arrangement on whether the data belongs to the establishment signing up for Apps, or the character user, but Google identify it doesn't belong to user. The data which you put into Google systems is yours, and believed it should keep on that way. The Google policy is that means three key things. They won't share user data with others except as noted in our Privacy Policy. They keep user data as long as user requires us to keep it. Finally, user should be able to take user data with user if user chooses to use external services in conjunction with Google Apps or stop using services altogether. The privacy data will be stored using Google's advanced worldwide data centers. There is no guarantee which data center will house the data. Google does this to guarantee that they can best handle safety, scalability, usage spikes, and redundancy. 7. Manage Change .Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. Eric

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Schmidt joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001. As far as concern, the number of staff for Google keeps increasing time by time. The main objective to hire number of staff around the world is to maximize the effectiveness of people involved in planning, controlling, and implementing change, while also minimizing the negative effect of change of the business. 8. IT Strategic Planning Google has the potential to be the first-choice provider of many services that are now handled by internal IT organizations, starting with non-competitively-differentiating services such as email (which Google already provides to a number of enterprises), and ultimately including high-value-added functions and services such as business intelligence, mobile sales support, and others. Some IT organizations might consider it a boon to pass these functions on to Google so that the IT department can concentrate on very enterprise-specific competitively differentiating applications. IT organizations that measure their worth in terms of how much of the company’s IT needs they supply themselves will be less happy to see Google move in on their turf-and I do mean specifically that in many cases it will be an argument about turf, not enterprise value. 9. Making Better Use of Information Other information management strategy is how to make possible access to information for the entire world, even though Google is headquartered in California. The main mission is to facilitate the information over the web page to the internet user throughout the world. The strategy is to maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of users living outside the United States. Google search results can be constrained to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user's preference. They also offer a translation feature to make content available to users regardless of their native tongue and for those who prefer not to search in English, Google's interface can be customized into more than 100 languages. 10. Evolving CIO Leadership Role

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Former CIO of Goolge, Merrill was one among a very strong team of Google engineering vice presidents. In that sense, Merrill's departure might have been felt more at a company that wasn't in the IT industry and had a limited number of computer scientists and engineers on its staff. Still, Merrill's defection is absolutely a public-relations blow for Google, which in the past year had it seems that made a conscious effort to build up its CIO's public profile. Merrill spoke at industry events and granted one-on-one interviews to IT and generalinterest magazines, eventually realizing a higher level of acknowledgment than the average CIO. This might put in plain words why news of his job change has echoed so stalwartly across the blogosphere and in the technology journalists. Certainly, the job of Google CIO is a big one and it remains to be seen if Merrill's departure will result in any degradation or destabilization of the IT services provided to employees, partners and customers, always a possibility after a high-level change like this one.

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2.0

References

1) Maes, R., 1999. A Generic Framework for Information Management. Prime Vera Working Paper, University Van Amsterdam. 2) Http://qualityg.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html [viewed 2/10/2008]. 3) Http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/10/24/the-technical-challenges-facing-google [viewed 12/10/2008]. 4) Http://simplifiedstrategicplanning.blogspot.com/2008/04/strategic-planning-itgoogle-and.html [viewed 5/10/2008]. 5) Http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/13/googles-schmidt-talks-stocks-huge-mobileopportunity-scandals-advertising-and-youtube-with-jim-cramer/ [viewed 15/10/2008] 6) Http://www.cio.com/article/328064/Google_CIO_Changes_His_Tune_He_Ads_ for_EMI [viewed 18/09/2008]. 7) Http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleI D=192300292 [viewed 17/10/2008]. 8) Http://www.google.com/corporate/business.html [viewed 21/10/2008]. 9) Http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html [viewed 21/10/2008]. 10) Http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html [viewed 20/10/2008]. 11) Http://www.networkworld.com/best/2006/022706information-management.html [viewed 10/10/2008]. 12) Http://www.pdfcoke.com/doc/3867127/Challenges-faced-by-Live-Search-increating-a-compelling-experience?autodown [viewed 7/10/2008].

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