? What were the key factors behind Google's early success?
? Do you expect the search business to become more concentrated (i.e.: dominated by fewer firms)?
? Is search a winner-take-all business?
? In renewing its deal with AOL, could Google afford to pay AOL more than 100% of the revenue generated from AOL searches?
? How did Microsoft's maximum affordable bid for AOL's search traffic compare to Google's?
In addition to enhancing its core search business, should Google also branch out into new arenas? Which of the follow would you recommend:
? Building a full-fledged portal like Yahoo's;
? Targeting Microsoft's desktop hegemony; and / or
? Becoming an e-commerce intermediary like eBay?
Presentation of the company
(copy paste from Wikipedia because it is just an historic)
Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked back links to estimate a site's importance. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search ...