Background Summary
Founded on September 4, 1998 Google quickly revolutionized the search engine and the Internet alike. Within two years of starting operations Google had become the largest single search engine in the world and began to dominate the market. As the World Wide Web (web) grew in popularity and became more and more a part of everyone’s daily life, Google too grew in popularity “because it could provide simple, fast, and relevant search results” (Deresky, 2011). The differentiating factor was Google’s “PageRank technology which displays results…by looking for keywords inside web pages, but also gauging the importance of a search result based on the number and popularity of other sites that linked to the page” (Deresky, 2011).
The use of Google has always been free to the user, the two revenue-generating avenues that have made Google one of the most profitable companies of the last decade is advertising and selling its technology. Google’s advertising branch is called AdWords and allows those wishing to advertise to “create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to the business. When people search on Google using keywords, ads appear next to or above search results” (Google.com).
With the rapid success experienced in the U.S., Google quickly grew their business into the global arena by offering search results in hundreds of languages and being available on hundreds of different domains. This expansion helped to significantly increase Google’s revenues and made its IPO launch in 2004 possible. As Google began to dominate search engine market share in France, Germany, and Japan, it created concern and ultimately distrust of the U.S. domination that was taking place in their countries. This distrust led to lawsuits on the grounds of copyright infringement by multiple companies in France who were ultimately successful in the