Google Means Every

I was teaching an undergraduate math class in 1985 and decided to give the students a fun extra-credit assignment. "Find out what a googol is," I told them. This was a time before the Internet and locating such information required a little bit of research in the library. Most chose not to do the research, but a few came back with the correct answer: a googol is the number 10100 or a one followed by 100 zeroes. The original googol term was actually coined by a nine-year-old boy in 1938 and then popularized by his uncle, mathematician Milton Sirotta, in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. The number has no real significance in mathematics or the sciences, but it is a useful shorthand notation for the idea of a very, very large number. Math and science teachers sometimes use the googol to give some perspective to the size of the universe or the size of infinity. A googol is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated at between 10^sup 79^ and 10^sup 81^ atoms, assuming one still believes in the existence of atoms. The googol has appeared in popular entertainment onand- off for decades. Charles Schultz used it in a 1963 Peanuts comic strip; Steve Martin used it in a 1979 comedy album; it appeared in an episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and it was the one million-pound question on the British version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (1). From Googol to Google But then in 1998, two Stanford graduate students changed the spelling of the word and launched Google, making the obscure mathematics term a household name. The googol was an unknown curiosity for the first 60 years of its life before getting a makeover and becoming the world's most widely recognized company (2). So if googol means the numeral one followed by 100 zeroes, what does Google mean? Like its namesake, Google means a very, very large number of web pages, documents, customers, advertisers, and dollars. Like googol, it falls short of being infinite, but it is difficult to imagine anything else that is quite as big as a googol or a Google. The company started with a new idea for ranking page searches on the Internet. Instead of giving a high rank to pages on which the search term occurs the most frequently, they ranked a page highly based on how many other outside pages linked to it. This led searchers to the most prominent pages, rather than those engineered with many keywords. The result has been one of the fastest growing companies ever and the expansion of its product line into dozens of information niches. But what do all of the company's niche products have to do with Google's core business, its strategy for the future, and what does this mean to people interested in understanding technology innovation and management? In short, the mission and strategy of Google is all summed up in the origins of its name-googol. The company is positioning itself to deliver all of the information that goes through everyone's hands, eyes, networks, and hard drives in the future. This kind of universal mission is not new from companies in Silicon Valley. There have been many before Google that have made similar claims. But none of those have had the revenue generation engine to make it happen and none of them has expanded into as many products as Google has. Google's products are becoming ubiquitous to Internet users. They go far beyond the search service. In fact, the company is actually based on advertising today, more than search. Google is using its advertising revenue to create a googol's worth of tools, to reach a googol's worth of users who are performing a googol of different activities. Google's Tools It is important to look at the tools that Google offers and understand what each of these means in terms of exposure. Leading Google products and their objectives are: * Search-indexing and delivering every web site. * AdWords-used by every company to promote every product. …