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 1
List of Figures 2

1.0 Question Related to Case Study

1.1 What is the core tenet of Google's strategy to dominate 3
the field of search engine?
1.2 How is Google different from other major search engines? 4-7
1.3 What is PageRank? Why it might produce more effective 7-8
results from searching a large index? What are limitations
this approach?
1.4 What kind of business model(s) does Google use? 8-10
1.5 In what ways does the selected organization exemplify the 10-11
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 11-12
opportunities that are faced by organization?
1.7 What information management strategies does the 13-14
organization exemplifies? How would you assess these
strategies?
1.8 How do you think the CIO or equivalent of the chosen 14-18
Organization would have responded to the Top Ten Issues
Survey from the MISQE?

2.0 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-for-
performance" 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 video-
sharing 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 general-
interest 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.

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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-it-
google-and.html [viewed 5/10/2008].

5) Http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/13/googles-schmidt-talks-stocks-huge-mobile-
opportunity-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_
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[viewed 10/10/2008].
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creating-a-compelling-experience?autodown [viewed 7/10/2008].

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