Case Analysis on Larry Page and Google Search Engine

Entrepreneurship and its Concepts

An entrepreneur is a person who undertakes a journey with some profit potential and involving risk. Therefore, entrepreneurship is a journey undertaken by the entrepreneur. UNIDO in 1999 as cited in Amiri and Marimaei (2012), defined entrepreneurship as a process involving initiative to transform business concepts to new ideas and diversifying the existing journey or enterprise to high growing potentials. Therefore, entrepreneur involves innovation, development, recognition, seizing opportunities and converting opportunities into marketable ideas, value while bearing the risk of competition. It basically deals with findings of social problems and moving forward and working towards the solutions of those problems. This requires an innovator who generates ideas to be implemented practically as an enterprise that can benefit planet, people and to be able to generate profit out of it. Entrepreneurship as a process involves many challenges and requires lots of effort for successful establishment and running of the business. The most interesting thing and the reward of being entrepreneurship is you get to be your own boss and doing something that you enjoy setting your own schedule. Larry Page is one of them who founded Google search engine together with his friend Sergey Brin in 1998. The company has become the world’s most popular search engine because of their reputation for being a most reliable source of information. Today the Larry Page is the twelfth world’s richest man with a net worth of $51.4.

Background

Larry Page is an internet entrepreneur and an American computer scientist who teamed up with his friend Sergey Brin to lunch the search engine Google in 1998. He was born in 1973 and both of his parents are computer expert. Thus, he followed his parents and studied computer engineering at Michigan University, with honors and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Standard University where he met his friend Sergey Brin. Together they developed a search engine Google. The company has become the world’s most popular search engine.

The head quarter of Google search engine is located in Mountain View, California. Over the years, Google has achieved so many amazing things such as Ad Sense, Google Maps, G- mail, Android, YouTube, Verizon Partnership and I-Phone Search. The company serves as the internet search function, cloud computing, as well as range of different advertising solutions. Their users continued to grow rapidly with their reputation for being efficient and most reliable source offering relevant information at a maximum speed.

Entrepreneurial Journey

Larry Page who was a good reader used to spend a lot of time in reading science and technology books and magazines. He was always interested in inventing things and when he was at the age of twelve, he read the biography of genius inventor Nikola Tesla who died in poverty and oblivion. He became upset about this fact and so he found out that it was very important to create some kind of revolutionary technology and to approach this matter from a business point of view. He started to have a dream of starting a company someday.

When Page studied at University of Michigan, he became interested in the future of transport system. He joined University’s solar-powered car development team an idea of high-speed monorail system between campuses. When Page was 23 years old, he began to wonder how to download the entire internet. In the year 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they are in Standard University they started to develop search engine as a part of their research project and named it as the “BackRub”. In order to determine a site’s authority they designed the search engine to explore the connecting links between web pages. They called the search engine “Google” after the mathematical term “google”, which means No. 1 followed by 100 zeros to organize the information available on the web.

Later, Page and Brin decided to formally incorporate their company. In the year 1998, they set up their first data center in a garage. They started to look for the investors in their initiatives. As a result, Andy Bechtolsheim who is a founder of Sun Microsystems invested about $ 100,000 in their company. They manage to raise over $ 1 million over a period of time. After raising $ 1 million from their family, friends and other investors, finally they were able to establish their Google search engine on 7 September 1998 with Craig Silverstein as a first employee.

Initially, Google served over 10,000 queries per day and slowly it gained popularity of most reliable source of information. By 1999, it was serving over 500,000 queries per day and soon the company could expand from small garage to now a mega office. In 2013, it was serving an average of 5.9 billion queries. Google currently serve 40,000 search queries per second which accounts for more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. In 2015, American multinational conglomerate Alphabet Inc. was created as parent company of Google. It was completed on 2nd October 2015. In November 2015, it ranked first amongst the multi- platform web properties in the United States with 247 million U.S. unique visitors and a market share of 63.9 percent among the leading U.S search engine providers.

Nowadays Larry is working both on the creation of unmanned vehicles Waymo, and on the smart transport system. He invested $ 100M in Zee Aero, which develops new revolutionary modes of transport. Moreover, he has invested in the Kitty Hawk startup which deals with flying machines.

Strength of the Company

Google web service provide the facilities such as image search, Google news, blogs search, Google search and other facilities to the people. It provides thousands of information in a different format for the easy access of information by the users. They gather all types of information in English worldwide and it is the important source of different media. The users can keep track on important events, appointments and special occasion through the use of Google calendar. Google also offers free mail service including G-mail and social networks like Orkut. The Google earth and Google map provide facilities to locate and learn about that area and can get satellite and aerial images from their desktop. It also provides information to purchase book online and read the books online. In the YouTube users can search and watch videos. Moreover, Google provides photo sharing options in the Picasa web album.

Weakness of the Company

Google portfolio does not have commerce feature as 99% of its revenue comes from advertising and rest 1% from licensing of service. It is very difficult to capture context because Google has only one search box. Google is lagging behind Yahoo. The users can organize the Google page. The user can go to other user account and see the profile that is the criticism of the privacy. Google Ad sense is under serious threat from vertical AD network.

Opportunities

Google can start with some services like product search, print media, multimedia and private database. Google can also add chat rooms and email systems to attract the users. It can increase switching charges by tracking users search histories only if they permit and could remain them through emails for their relevant search updates as per their personal requirement and interest. Google can also become a mass-market portal like yahoo and MSN can increase watching cost of users. It can also provide full-fledged services on hand held mobile devices to acquire market beyond conventional internet.

Threat

Google should be aware of new search engines which promise to improve search services compare to them. For an example, like new search engine supported by power set. There is lots of competitor growing in. In addition, at some point MSN and Yahoo may merge becoming a threat to Goggle Company. Experts also found out that Goggle lacks peer search services.

Recommendations

Google can adopt market modification strategy as it can grow its impressions by increasing the frequency of searches by users, providing new search services and the traffic to sites in its search and advertising networks. They can also provide services where users cannot go to other user account and see the profile. With change in time they also need to change their service provider by improving their search engine so that users are always there to use their service.

Conclusion

In the year 1995, Larry Page and his friend Sergey Brin began to work on search engine as a part their research project because both of them where found of computer technologies. In 1998, they set up their first data center in a garage as a small company with the investment of $1 million. But soon the company could expand from small garage to now a mega office which is located at Mountain View, California. They were able to establish their Google search engine on 7 September 1998 with Craig Silverstein as a first employee. The company has become the world’s most popular search engine. Over the years, Google has achieved Google service such as Ad Sense, Google Maps, G-mail, Android, YouTube, Verizon Partnership and I- Phone Search. The company serves as the internet search function, cloud computing, as well as range of different advertising solutions. Slowly Google gained popularity of most reliable source of information. Their users continued to grow rapidly with their reputation for being efficient and most reliable source offering relevant information at a maximum speed.

References

1. Adamovich, K. (2019). Larry Page turns 46: How he launched Google and Alphabet. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com. Accessed on 15 October 2019.
2. Amiri, S. N and Marimaei R.M. (2012). Concept of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurs Traits and Characteristic. Scholarly-jourmals, 2 (7), 150-155.
3. Lyu, F. ( 2012). Strategic Analysis of Search Engine Giant: A Case Study of Google Inc. International Journal of Computing & Business Research, ISSN(online), 2229-6166.
4. Shravya. (2017). Larry Page & The story of Google. Retrieved from http://www.google.com. Accessed on 15 October 2019. http://www.flickr.com/ http://www.google.com/