1 Dr. Michael D. Featherstone Introduction to e-Commerce Google/Competitors/SEM

2 The four phases of search. 1.A sweeping scan of all the worlds web pages via a web “crawler” or “spyder” 2.Indexing the resulting data and storing it on servers 3.Triggered by a user query, return results which provide the best match (search quality) 4.Format and deliver results. Google

3 Web Crawler (Spyder)

4 Google “Google's technology has emerged from a series of continuous improvements or what Japanese management consultants call Kaizen.” (The Google Story, David Vise, 2005) Google must be pretty important if we’re going to devote time in class to study it… IT IS. In the past five years Google’s revenues have grown by 50%. It is in the 100 th percentile market capitalization and the 97 th in EPS. It has passed Microsoft to become the second largest technology company in the U.S.

5 “As the heavyweight of online search, Google is one of the worlds most ubiquitous brands and an indispensable tool for anyone navigating cyberspace.” (Gary Hamel, ‘The Future of Management’, 2007) As [Cloud Computing] spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer. (Business Week, Dec 13, 2007 “Google and the Wisdom of Clouds”)

6 Google HOW GOOGLE CHANGED SEARCH Early search engines competed primarily on the quantity of returns. Many of these search engines were subject to website authors attempt to game the system, since there crawlers/spyders looked for the frequency of search words. View testinfo.com

7 Google HOW GOOGLE CHANGED SEARCH Yahoo (1994; reborn 2002): Before Google, before AltaVista, there was Yahoo. Despite all the changes in the search space over the years, Yahoo has remained a popular search destination on the web. Yahoo stood out from its early competitors by using humans to catalog the web, a directory system. Yahoo’s crawler-based results from its partners only kicked in if there were no human-powered matches. That actually made Yahoo more relevant than competitors for many years, until the Google-era ushered in crawler-based results that were both comprehensive and highly relevant.

8 Here is a bit of trivia… Google was originally called Backrub… Because Larry Page had a new idea for categorizing search results. Google

9 HOW GOOGLE CHANGED SEARCH Google based its search on a new search algorithm Started as a research project by Stanford PhD candidates Sergey Brin and Larry Page “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” 1997 It was based on inbound links (remember? We’ve been talking about them. Here was the reasoning (Remember that Brin and Page were both grad students at Stanford). Let’s just say that I have written this brilliant paper. IN FACT IT IS SO GOOD – That many other papers cite my paper in later papers that they write about e-business. In effect they are saying my paper is an authoritative source. That is the idea behind what became ‘Page Rank”

10 Google HOW GOOGLE CHANGED SEARCH As they tested this idea it resulted in highly relevant search results. Grew primarily by word of mouth Incorporated “Page Rank” (a neat little play on words) From “The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page Why is understanding a bit about how page rank works important, from an e- Commerce perspective?

11 Google About Page Rank PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.“ Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

12 Google About Page Rank Pages that have many links from many other pages are worth looking at. Pages with links from an influential site, like Yahoo are worth looking at. Pages with links from other influential sites like universities are worth looking at. Improving a sites ‘page rank’ in Google (or any search engine) has become a huge Web ‘cottage industry’

13 Google But something beside page rank has to going on to make Google the powerhouse it has become…Arguably, the most important technology company in the USA (or the world for that matter). How could Google turn this great search engine into a revenue producing process? How could they monetize Search? What would be their business model? Google rejected both Paid Inclusion and Pay for Placement search monetization models

14 Google Monetized search by “Paid Placement’’ Could have bought Google for One Million – but had a strategic reason for not wanting ‘better search results’ Thought up a ‘better way’ to monetize search – IRONICALLY they were purchased by Yahoo!

15 Thank you for your attention This Concludes Today’s Presentation