edf40wrjww2CF_PaperMaster:Desc
This paper is focused on Google Inc case, the largest American company (by market capitalization) that is not part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average . This choice is motivated by the success story of this company as well as the remarkable business model that makes it stands in front of giants like YAHOO and beat them.
This Report begins by presenting the company and its history, describing the competitive advantage of the firm and analysing it.
My analysis was mainly based on articles published in specialized websites, magazines and frameworks from the course.
The company
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by 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 ranking of 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 backlinks to estimate a site's importance.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and usability. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at US$.05 per click.
Google strategic advantage analysis
To better understand Google and its business model, one needs to break it down into three data inputs.
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