By: Sam Poggi

1999 Google Inc. 39 employees Mostly engineers Money was running out, and Google needed a business model that would begin to bring in money

Google in 1999 cont… Could have made a deal with DoubleClick An ad network that specialized in graphical banners Turned down the opportunity because it went against the ideals of page and Brin The ads had no relevance to anything

The New Approach They would sell only text adds to sponsors who targeted particular key words Ex. “Ford cars” An ad for Ford Motor Company would appear above the results They were sold on a cost per-thousand model (CPM) Advertisers paid by the number of impressions Google delivered Ultimately if this philosophy did not work, Google would make the deal with Double Click

Nasdaq Market Crash.com crash DoubleClick’s stock went from $150 to $15 When the market crashed, Google looked to GoTo.com for their business model Allowed Advertisers to buy text ads online with a credit card Google separated the search results from the ad results

October 2000 AdWords “Have a credit card and 5 minutes? Get your ad on Google today.” Still maintained a CPM approach Advertisers paid by the impression, not by the click Became a big hit

Dealing with Growth In August 1999, Google had 3 million search queries a day By mid 2000, the search queries increased to 18 million per day The Index surpassed 1 billion documents Making Google the largest search engine on the web

The Deal with Yahoo Google replaced Inktomi as Yahoo’s core search service The deal validated Google’s technology, and brought more people to the site Yahoo bought a $10 million dollar equity stake in Google

Late 2000 Adwords debuts Google was having 60 million search queries per day Google had yet to spend any money on marketing

Advertising and Marketing Everyone else in the search business was advertising Google began to look for a way to advertise, but ultimately found none Google then scratched the plan to market and decided to use PR as a tool for getting people to read and talk about Google

Google’s Expansion Google went from a few employees to forty in its first year, then to 150 by 2000 Google had a very strict hiring process, often times they would debate for hours about a particular candidate Google wanted to avoid the hiring spiral

Eric Schmidt CEO of Google since 2001 Went to Berkley Since he took over the company has never had a down quarter

Growing too much? By July 2001 Google had over 200 employees and were hiring five more per week The hiring spiral became a real threat “Don’t be evil” This was put in the corner of every blackboard to remind people to have good business ethics

2001: The Year Google Got Big Handling more than 100 million searches per day Acquired DejaNews A public messaging system with nearly 500 million posts on a wide variety of subjects Much faster than just using the web crawler Google then went on to buy Blogger, Picasa, and Keyhole These launched Google print Google Images ballooned to 250 million images Overall, Google had over 3 billion total documents

2001, Cont. Serving search queries in 40 different languages Entry into the mobile phone market Partnerships with Cingular, AT&T, and Handspring Brin and Page ultimately regained control of the company, and made all ideas go through them

2001: Cont. AdWords was growing rapidly $85 million in revenue Overture had $288 million in revenue, and Google took note of their pay-per click method In Overture’s model, advertisers could buy the top link Google made a model where they ranked the ads based off their popularity and cost per click This was called AdRank

AdSense AdSense allowed third party-publishers to access Google’s network of Advertisers and sign up for AdSense Google would then scan the site and place relevant ads on the site similar to the way Google does for itself By 2005 it was 15% of Google’s overall revenues