Google: The Web's Top Referrer
In 1996, somebody studying at Stanford had a dream of indexing all the web pages on the internet, and ranking them by the number of backlinks - that dude became the co-founder of Google.
I've been thinking about Google a lot recently. Not just because they own / control:
- Google Search
- Adwords (As of 2018, Google derives 86% of its total revenues through here)
- YouTube
- The Chrome Browser
- Android & The App Store
- Gmail
- The Google Work Suite (Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides)
- Google Hangouts
- Google Analytics (For Tracking Your Website Metrics)
- Google Tag Manager (For Feeding Custom User Behavior into All Your Analytics Platforms)
- Google Data Studio (for Data Visualization)
I would like to take a moment just to discuss the amazing Product Management Feats achieved with the last 3 above-mentioned products alone:
How Did Google Get Here?
When you study how the Adwords Bidding System works, you'll see how Google prioritizes Ad Relevancy over Max Profits. In short: If a google user searches: "Blue Shirt", the Advertiser selling blue shirts can pay less, and rank higher, than an advertiser selling "Brown Shirts". More on how the Adwords Bidding System works here:
Google takes its Adwords relevancy so seriously, that it's created 4 different types of keywords match types for advertisers: Broad Match, Broad Match Modified, Phraase Match, and Exact Match - differences below, if you're interested in digging deeper.
It is undeniable - Google rewards advertisers that provide relevant ads - reason being: it provides a better User Experience for Google Search Users. They've done this really well.
No sirree, you won't hear a word of complaint from me about Google, especially because they've recently given my parents' foundation, Chaya Israel, a Google Ads Grant (My dad was a Rabbi for many years in Manhattan, and most of the donors have historically been from Manhattan - maybe Google can change that. We feed the hungry by donating to food drives).
What's next for Google?
I'm not concerned that Google controls this size of the internet market - in fact, they've earned their ranking via tremendous added value to society. Besides, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft (owns LinkedIn and Github), Shopify, Uber, Airbnb.... have their own pieces of the pie, and there's more pie to come as the global economy shifts to transacting more and more via the web (in every industry).
It's kinda like how Bill Gates was asked in the recent Netflix Biography about his monopoly trials in the 90's: "Did you actually have a monopoly?" Gates responded: "If monopoly means extremely high market share with short term market power, the answer is yes. If it means that we had an unchallengeable position where new and better technology didn't have a chance to replace us, the answer is no."
The true point of curiosity is: what did those original Specks look like back in 1996? I assume it was something like:
- Scrape the Entire Web (Extract Backlinks per site and add backlinks to a queue - then loop through sites in the queue)
- Party tonight at Omega
- Create Front-End GUI - should include Input Box and Search Functionality - order results according to relevancy + sites with highest number of backlinks
- Do Laundry
Little did he realize that the app would become this: