Top 1000 2010: Company 6 - Google
Barrow Street buzz
A company that can cause international diplomatic incidents, Google also remains an important player in the Irish market.
Few companies on the planet are big enough or so all pervasive that they can start a war of words between the world’s two major superpowers. But that is what happened when Google Inc delighted free-speech advocates by pulling out of China over censorship and cyber attacks.
Google Newsfeed
April 29th: Baidu outlook rockets after Google's Chinese exit
China's top Internet search firm Baidu Inc is emerging as a big winner following Google's recent retreat from China as it smashed analysts' forecasts, suggesting increased business from advertisers. Baidu's American Depositary Shares - which have already more than doubled this year on Google's shuttering of its Google.cn site - soared 14%.
April 21st: Google launches free sat-nav for Irish users
Google releases the beta version of its free turn-by-turn navigation software for the Irish market. The software – which was previously available to US users only – will work on Android handsets with a version number of 1.6 or higher.
April 16th: Google profit rise fails to
impress; shares slip
Google Inc posts a 23% jump in quarterly revenue on a rebound in Web advertising, but its stock falls 5% as the company disappointed some investors accustomed to blowout results.
Analysts said key indicators for the quarter - including a 7% rise in average cost-per-click, the price that advertisers pay when Web surfers click their search ads - appeared strong, even if investors had hoped for more from a company that had beaten earnings forecasts in seven of the past eight quarters.
Google, which controls roughly two-thirds of the U.S. search market, said revenue in the first quarter totaled $6.77bn, compared with $5.51bn in the year-ago period. Google posted net income of $1.96bn, or $6.06 a share, up from $1.42bn, or $4.49 a share, in the year-earlier period.
March 16th: Facebook overtakes Google as most viewed website in US
Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US, according to figures from Hitwise. Mark Zuckerburg's social networking phenomenon took a 7.07% share of the US internet market for the week ending March 14th 2010. This compares to a 2.5% share for the same time the year before. Google finishes the month with a 7.03% share of the market. The rise in Facebook traffic represented a 185% increase on the same period a year previously, while visits to Google increased 9% during the same timeframe.
February 9th: Google introduces Buzz to challenge Facebook, Twitter
Google introduces a new product dubbed Google Buzz that allows users to quickly share messages, web links and photos with friends and colleagues directly within Gmail, the company's popular email product.
Google's move deeper into social networking is seen as an attempt by the world's No. 1 search engine to fend off competition from Facebook and Twitter.
China was not impressed and the US was quick to jump to the defence of one of its star companies. It is all the more amazing given that Google was first incorporated as a privately held company in 1998 when it was founded by two Stanford University Ph.D. candidates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Since then it has gone a long way towards its stated mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But given its willingness to censor its Chinese search engine, its unofficial motto “Don't be evil” often came in for criticism. But that all changed earlier this year after the high profile spat with China when it effectively exited the world's largest Internet market.
Ireland, by comparison, may be a very small market but it has become a crucial hub for the internet giant. Google opened one of its first global offices in Ireland in 2003 with just five employees, to support its international advertisers. A year later, it opened its headquarters on Barrow Street in Dublin 4 with Google Ireland Limited reporting turnover of €3.343bn in 2006. The turnover for Google Ireland Limited for the year ended 31 December 2009 is €7.8bn and the Dublin office has responsibility for half a million advertisers and half a million publishers, as well as the millions of users of its online products, in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
A rebound in web advertising this year saw Google post a 23% jump in quarterly revenue, but its stock fell 5% as some investors had grown accustomed to much higher results.
Search to stratosphere
Google started as a search engine but now offers users everything from video to word processing to social networking. It is pushing more and more computer users, both personal and business, into the "cloud" where, for example, common business applications are made available online. The company has built a formidable and highly sophisticated worldwide advertising network on top of these often random but interconnected online services. The bulk of the staff working in the Dublin office work on aspects of this advertising business.
New products come thick and fast (not to mention for free) as Google rapidly colonises more and more of the landscape of the average technology user as Microsoft did two decades ago.
Using the company's Adwords software, advertisers, with the help of Google staff, choose search terms that will trigger their ads. They also set a maximum amount that they are willing to pay per click. This becomes an auction to decide which ad will receive the best position when any given search term is entered by a user.
Clients are spread across 45 different markets and this, say some, is the key reason that Google chose Dublin as its European HQ. Of the 1,500 staff, 1,200 are non-Irish. They are from 58 different countries, speak 53 languages, all have third level qualifications and many have PhDs.
