Google To Go Public? a discuss of the search engine King

Essay by DaRkNeOCollege, UndergraduateA+, April 2004

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Is the search king ready to go public? This is a question being debated everywhere. Everyone would like a piece of Google, but is it a sure profit? What could a Google IPO mean for the market? Most of all what makes Google so special from all the other search engines?

In the minds of two Stanford students was a vision. A vision of enabling users to search through a database if billions of cached pages. Google now has over four billion pages stored on their server and is used for 80% of all internet searches. Google has even become the verb "googling" synonymous to "searching the internet". What differs Google from other search engines is in their PageRank system. Google "crawls" the web once a month and ranks pages by how many highly rank sites link to them. This process is highly effective since it's very hard to get linked to those sites.

This in result makes searches to be "non-fixed" like many other failed search engines. In most search engines people would pay for their site to be listed first and thus not always deliver the best content. Google's revenue is mainly based on their Adwords program which enables people to pay to have their site to be listed on the right of the page. These sites paid to be listed when certain relevant keywords are used. The advertiser pays a certain small fee "per-click".. This advertisement is said to be highly profitable for companies that use it, "buying this targeted traffic has been the bargain of a lifetime" 1.

Google's simple interface search engine made them the leader over rivals such as Yahoo! and the software giant's MSN. These two companies are still investing millions into search technology. Msn for example has announced plans for it's own...