Google is God
For something I’m working on, I compiled a bunch of stats on Google (sorry, I didn’t intend to blog it and so I didn’t capture all the links, but I found the collection so compelling I thought I’d share it):
• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.
Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.
December 29th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
The race is over, and Google won. They own my #1, #2, #3 referral sources to the Web site (Google Images, Search and Reader). They are my only Search Engine. They are my default RSS reader. They store more e-mail in one account than anybody. They own the online ad market. And so far, we trust them more than we ever did Microsoft.
December 29th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
More should be written about how this phenom has been MANAGED and continues to maintain BOTH innovation and scalability, simultaneously. As the financial services, music, publishing and healthcare industries implode — under the (consumer) pressure for change and demands for improved models/services, my company is a proud partner of Google. They have as much RESPECT for startups as they do the consumer. Seems so simple…as simple as the uncluttered Google homepage. RESPECT for those you serve. Nice.
December 30th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Yes, can’t stop admiring Google. One heck of an amazing and unique company.
December 30th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Google is not God.
It is not even the biggest thing on the ‘Net.
George Vreeland Hill is.
December 30th, 2007 at 3:40 am
The innovators always win.
December 30th, 2007 at 6:23 am
The game is far from over and the final score has yet to be posted.
December 30th, 2007 at 8:20 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis declares that “Google is God” after looking at the company’s growth in terms of [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 9:28 am
[...] Jarvs has uncovered some statistics about Google that illustrate its power and growth rate. Among the bullet [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 9:52 am
[...] Who needs Aristotle, Socrates, Plato…when Google offers “Our Philosophy.â€Â Heck, who needs Moses’ Ten Commandments, as Jeff Jarvis continues his ludicrous public cry to join him in worshipping God Google, really. [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Google is so wonderful. They keep my teeth white, help me lower my cholesterol and keep my laundry so soft and fresh.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Only one major product, and betting the farm on that and advertising: sounds a dangerously brittle position to me. I imagine they are flexible enough to keep going if keyword-oriented search and/or their approach to advertising collapses as a market, but not at the top of all those lists.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:23 am
I would just like them to make more jobs available via telecommuting, then maybe I would see them as a major part of life, or rather affecting a major part of MY life.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I had the opportunity to watch someone not-so-tech savvy use the “internet” recently. Rather than type the URL of the page into the browser bar (an easy URL to remember given the company name she was looking for), she typed Google’s address in the URL, searched for the company, then clicked on it in the organic search results (it returned #1).
I was astonished, but that is an important lesson. For her, Google IS the web. And I suspect there are many many many more like her.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:44 am
One firm having a dominant position in any industry is never a good thing.
Here is my short essay detailing why this is so in this case.
Google and the Dissemination of Knowledge
The first part deals with the potential for the limiting of access to information by design (censorship), the second part deals with the limits imposed by faulty indexing or other technical failures.
If it isn’t in the index, the information effectively doesn’t exist. This is not healthy in a democracy.
December 30th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Today, Google is a limber innovative company, but there will come a time when it will grow to believe its own bullshit and become an inefficient, bloated Microsoft-like hegemon, ripe for a takedown.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Truer thing never said.
December 30th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
[...] of almost frightening stats on Google by Jeff Jarvis - see Google is God. That’s one big brand and one big revenue [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
People scrutinize the ups and downs of newspaper advertising so closely, but we should really study the phenomenon of Google advertising.
It’s remarkable that Google is able to bring in $15 billion a year from those simple text-only ads, with no graphics, no flashing, blinking things. It’s also remarkable that there was $15 billion sitting around waiting to be spent by merchants of various sizes.
How much does Google spend on sales people? What’s their pitch? How much of it is automated, that is, it sells itself? Has Google solved its click-fraud problem? Are the advertisers doing $15 billion worth of business through these ads?
What if newspapers had a more automated process where a business could sign up for an ad and it would become like a little blog, that you could update at will?
December 30th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
The only constant with top search engines over the years is no one ever lasts forever. Let’s not forget Google’s business model is still 99%+ on pay per click advertising, which is directly related to user tracking, which is not in Google’s control but ISP’s around the world. Besides in terms of search, they are not even scratching the surface of what is possible.
The main question to ask is, is search in ten years will be remotely close to search today? And the answer to that should give you a good idea where we are heading.
Cheers
Sahar Sarid
December 30th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Hi,
Google is simply run by management that failed/learned their lessons at other companies.
It’s also had the same ambitions from the begining, both of being the alexandria of the modern world (as all other serch engines), and being at the point of transaction for every transaction possible. It has planned its road-map from that point on. Everything it does is simply a piece towards that jigsaw, whether that be Checkout or giving away free translation and 411 DQ services in return for building up the greater value that will come from intelligent Data-sets that will be the largest ever and be impossible for competitors to overcome -they also learnt the import of the network-effect/tipping-point as they learnt from ppc.
People forget that for almost half it’s life, google wasn’t anything meaningful in terms of the business-model, it was the guts/forsight/execution they had to not only rip-off GO.com’s patented PPC technology/model, but also pay well for Applied Semantics, and then expand and expand the distribution and inventory for its content/advertising making is as simple and atomically granular specifiy-ical as possible!
What that means is that if the other players hadn’t been as complacent and arrogant, they could also have obsessively have focussed on threats and opportunities, and bought some of those assets and moved first to build the barriers. What it also means, that any time google pisses off enough staff, customers (see: wpp and ebay), forces competitive alliances, gets lazy or simply too distracted, any one of those older or not-even-existing-yet companies (see facebook) have the potential to take it on.
Remeber, in the early days, I remeber google having to pitch, with only one product, to isp’s and portals for them to use and include it on their sites, and when you used to be able to get direct pr/contact from its founders -a world away.
The one great advantage that Google previously had that no one else dared to, was the hype and stupidity of “do no evil” greatest marketing in history!
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
December 30th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Google is also the worlds largest online auction. Hah take that eBay!
Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on http://www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.
The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads has been called a “generalized second price” auction. It is a variation of the Vickrey auction.
Whala.. worlds largest online auction house.
December 30th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Thanks for the post Jeff. Things change so quickly that it’s interesting to see how far Google has come just in the past year. Wow!
December 30th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
[...] pela manhã topei em um artigo que me chamou a atenção. Nele, o autor listava algumas estatÃsticas sobre o Google, por exemplo: [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
[...] Más Información | BuzzMachine [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Maybe Google has its incomes by his ad market in the Internet. Remember that Adwords is the first profit income of Google.
BTW: Translated to spanish: http://www.marlexsystems.org/estadisticas-que-indican-que-google-es-el-buscador-numero-1/
Have a Nice Day!
December 30th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
@Grich
Whala?
Do you mean, voila?
December 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Google is gret, but twitter is magic!
December 30th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
google also dominates website statistic services. there are not exact stats on how many sites converted to google analytics from other free services. since google analytics is so much better than other free services a lot of big and small sites convert to it and by that allow google to track “none-search” user activity. see more here
December 30th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
And they’re just getting started. Ad dollars need more than a trickle out of old media, open the floodgates please.
December 30th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
[...] BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Google is God (tags: google internet statistics) [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
[...] post: Google is God [...]
December 30th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Google Jostles for Controlling Share of Internet…
What’s that? Jostling for the controlling share of the Internet. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But what’s so absurd about it? Is it the fact that Google is trying to get control (don’t they already have it) or that someone (or …
December 30th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
lots of good points but not sure I’d quote anything from Rimm-Kaufman. They’re hardly a credible company.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:56 am
Yes, very innovative, amazing and so on… but I can’t use Google Earth from Cuba. Google behaves as a US Gov. Agency in this case.
Stop the US embargo against Cuba and we will have a more free and democratic country.
Jeff, thanks for your information and for the pleasure of your shared knowledge.
JAMP
journalist
Havana, Cuba
December 31st, 2007 at 6:03 am
[...] Just ask Jeff Jarvis: – Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.†– Times of London, 1/29/06 – Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise. – Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7. [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 7:19 am
[...] lo scorso anno c’è finito Giorgio Napolitano con questo video. Anche questo sarà così: Google is God, [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 8:23 am
[...] Is God” — alweer? Met zijn “amazing stats” heet ome Jeff Jarvis heeft het vast niet helemaal zo bedoeld: dat je Google moet worshippen tot je [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 9:53 am
[...] seen that actually mentions something about their religious affiliation online, says “Google is God.” Meanwhile, the only ad on Buzz Machine is delivered by Google, and the displayed inventory [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 11:24 am
[...] 31, 2007 Hoje pela manhã topei em um artigo que me chamou a atenção. Nele, o autor listava algumas estatÃsticas sobre o Google, por exemplo: [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 1:36 pm
They did it when others couldn’t. Period. Microsoft is so envious. Yahoo is still scratching its head wondering how they came in first, but got in last. Plus, they created a new word in the English Language: “Googled.”
December 31st, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Google is an alias for Internet!
December 31st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
google es una mierda google es el gran estafador
December 31st, 2007 at 8:43 pm
“God”?
I thought you pagans were worshipping the Earth these days?
January 1st, 2008 at 12:39 am
Polytheistic heathen worship multiple gods.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:56 am
One thing that google has in their corner is the fact that people still love them, and this is a big reason they are “god”. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without google!
All Hail Google!
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:04 am
Googleislord.com circa Xmas 2006.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:44 am
Google being the fastest growing company in history fits perfectly with a theory I’m working on - a fourth element of the perfect storm - the match between how the web and the economy have emerged.
Bit more here: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2008/01/perfect-storm-fourth-element.html
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
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January 4th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
[...] pela manhã topei em um artigo que me chamou a atenção. Nele, o autor listava algumas estatÃsticas sobre o Google, por exemplo: [...]
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January 10th, 2008 at 4:27 am
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January 10th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
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