I want it

This time there’s no fancy title. This firm has such a strong brand name that it makes the best headline possible. But we are here to talk about marketing strategies, what has Google to do with it? It’s all about inovation. They started with just a search engine with the simplest of outlines, backed up by a powerful searching and indexing algorithm. And with every new project, they have followed those guidelines. Take for example Gmail, it works perfectly, the design is superb yet very basic and has a source code that is a peace of art.

Of course some of their original ideas¹ didn’t really stick, and others modelled after hyped products² from the competitors failed as well, but by trying to cover everything, you are allowed to crash from time to time. They didn’t when approaching advertisement.

Google already had the most visited page on the known universe³, but in order to keep the simple free feel of the website, introducing advertisements had to be done stealthily. So they introduced sponsored websites before the results of your query that were related to the keywords entered. And that was the key. They started to build a database of queries linked to user interaction (final selection of links, clicks, …) to improve fitness of advertisement until they had enough tools to launch the ultimate advertisement application: AdWords.

AdWords allows you to put personalized advertisement through a very simple code, generating revenue for you based on number of clicks. Re-read the bold words if you still don’t know why Google is [again] on top.

And if you ever get lost you can always ask Google…

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¹ Google failed attempt at merging mailing with social networking, Buzz, hasn’t been abandoned yet but it doesn’t seem it’ll ever take off.
² Google failed attempt at social network, Orkut, is still running but with 100 million users is a far second to +600 million Facebook users.
Google’s failed attempt at short messaging, Wave, has been dropped from development, but that is more of a trend due to users switiching to mobile phone messaging with applications such as Twitter.
³ More than 7% of US traffic (http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/16/technology/facebook_most_visited/)