You can make money

without doing evil.

from Googles mission
and philosophy statement

The Google Guys

B
y any measure Google is In 1998, Page and Brin raised
one of the great success $1 million and officially launched
stories of the Internet age. Search for Tomorrow Google. (The name Google is
a play on the huge number
The Google search engine han-
dles hundreds of millions of queries a daythe majority of googola 1 followed by 100 zeroes.) The start-up operated
all Web search requests. To many Web users, the term out of a garage. Today, Google has thousands of employees
google is synonymous with search (as in, Have you googled around the globe.
yourself lately?) People use Google to find facts, search for
images, shop, locate other people, and even do background
checks on blind dates. Today, Google is far more than a
search engineits the most visited Web site on the planet.
Google was launched by two Stanford Ph.D. com-
puter science students from opposite sides of the globe.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow; Larry Page is from
Michigan. In 1996, Page started a research project to
improve Web search engines. Early search engines ranked
pages by counting how many times the searched-for
word or phrase appeared on the page. Sites could fool
these search engines by repeating a particular phrase
hundreds of times. Page teamed up with Brin to write
BackRub, a search engine that determined a Web pages
relevance by counting the number of times other related
Web pages linked to it.
Page borrowed money and built a Web server in his
dorm room; Brins dorm room became the business office. FIGURE 7.1 Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

235
236 CHAPTER 7 Database Applications and Privacy Implications

In 2004, Google offered shares to the public, making

Brin and Page instant billionaires. Googles management
defied convention by establishing procedures to keep the
company focused on long-term strategies rather than
short-term profits. In their letter to potential investors,
Brin and Page wrote, Google is not a conventional com-
pany. We do not intend to become one.
Googles relaxed corporate culture is anything but
conventional, but it has placed the company at the top
of Fortunes list of the hundred best places to work.
According to Googles philosophy, Work should
be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.
Engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their
time on projects that interest them. One personal pro-
ject turned into Gmail, the free email service; another
became Google News, a widely used news and blog
reader; many other pet projects have become success-
ful products.
Today Google products and services include Google
AdWords and AdSense, leading online advertising ser-
vices; YouTube, the hub of the Webs video culture;
Google Maps and Google Earth, 2-D and 3-D interactive
global mapping tools; Google Docs, an online suite of
office applications; Google Desktop, a PC file searching
tool; Google Chrome, a mostly open-source Web Browser;
Google Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system for
PCs and Netbooks; Google Android, a Linux-based OS for
smart phones; and much more.
Many of Googles business decisions are driven by
more than a desire to maximize profits. The companys
stated mission is to organize the worlds information and
make it universally accessible and useful, and many of its
initiatives involve sharing, rather than hording, information.
In 2007 the company spearheaded the Open Handset
Alliance to develop a set of open standards for mobile
phones. In 2008, Google opened its digital doors to outside
developers, providing them with a free platform for build-
ing and sharing projects.
FIGURE 7.2 Google headquarters viewed using Google Earth, a
free application that combines satellite imagery, maps, and Googles
search engine.
But Googles phenomenal growth has occasionally
challenged its do-no-evil mission. For example, in 2005
Google, like many other companies, agreed to allow the
Chinese government to censor searches made by Chinese
citizens; company officials decided that it was better to
have a restricted presence in the most populous country
in the world than not to be there at all. In 2010, after dis-
covering that the Chinese government had hacked into
Google systems and stolen corporate secrets, the com-
pany moved its Chinese search operations to Hong Kong
and stopped censoring searches. Google has also been
criticized as a threat to personal privacy (because of the
massive amounts of data people voluntarily post via
searches, email, and more), copyright laws (because of
unauthorized postings on YouTube and Googles attempt
to digitize thousands of books without author/publisher
permission), and the environment (because of the mas-
sive amounts of energy consumed by their servers).
In spite of occasional growing pains, the company
continues to soar. By combining database technology
with a seemingly endless supply of creative ideas, Google
is having an enormous impact on our lives.

We live in an information age. Were bombarded with information by television, radio,

newspapers, magazines, books, and computers. Its easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer
quantity of information were expected to deal with each day. Computer applications, such
as word processors and spreadsheets, can aggravate the problem by making it easier for
people to generate more documents full of information.
Database software can help alleviate information overload. Databases make it possible
for people to store, organize, retrieve, communicate, and manage information in ways that