Forum Moderators: goodroi
...said it consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks,
Recently, Mr. Page, a 30-year-old software designer, sought to declare the company's newest office building off-limits to telephones, under the belief that it would improve programmer productivity. He almost succeeded. He relented just a week before the building was to open, when someone pointed out that the law required a phone in the elevator. The building now has a phone system.
...executives have privately told the board that revenue will soar from less than $300 million in 2002 to $750 million or more this year, with gross profit margins of 30 percent...
So that explains why the new office building has been nicknamed, the MoneyPlex.
54000 servers, 100000 processors .. numbers are just unimaginable .. I doubt if any other application will be more than two orders of magnitudes below this.
I liked this part best in the article :)
Schmidt recently had to scramble to convince them (Sergey and Larry) that there was no immediate reason for Google to enter the space-tethering business.
A) The war - and who knows who the US may target next or what will happen in Iraq.
B) SARS - Asia is in some serious trouble as this continues, and until it is fully understood etc. then a lot of people will hold all advertising budgets.
As I say I know very little about Google's revenue etc but I doubt that company in the economy we have would double.
Google is quietly betting on techniques from the world of artificial intelligence. The company is trying to improve its search quality beyond its original ranking formula by developing software that can infer what a questioner wants by mining a database of millions of queries.
Nice lengthy interesting article.
"They're the traffic cop at the main intersection of the information society," said Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "They have an awesome responsibility."
nicely worded reality of now.
Singapore has even said it cannot say (impossible was the word used) to determine its growth for the following year because of this.
Cathay Pacific a major airline has cut over 40% of flights not only within Asia but around the world and they are not alone.
As I say I know very little about Google's revenue etc but I doubt that company in the economy we have would double.
My companies revenue has tripled compared to last year. We should be hitting the revenue level that we did all of last year some time this month.
I could see these figures being possible because if a companies sales are down they might try running some AdWord campaigns to make up for the slight dip.
I suppose I am in the same boat as you since I don't know much about Google as a business, but if they say it then there must be somebody that feels strongly about the validity of those numbers.
We are also up on last year but if you look at these last two weeks and use them to estimate future revenue it has to be said we are then down on last year.
There are many business search query areas without any ads whatsoever.
I have yet to meet an entrepreneur to whom I explained the workings of Google ads that did not try it out with satisfaction. But I refrain from telling others for fear of overall ad-price increases. ;)
Actually I must thank you for that tip.
I only ask as if it is April to April then the statement could be true.
But I do fear that the wars and SARS will seriosly affect Google.
A friend of mine wanted to go from HK to UK for business but everyone in the UK refused to meet him, this must affect the global economy.
Plus when you consider the airlines are laying off more people than ever before it is also going to affect the global economy and hence ads on Google.
Yes, their traffic skyrocketed [webmasterworld.com], and consequently so did revenue.
I only ask as if it is April to April then the statement could be true.
Sure you can't believe _everything_ you read, but this is the NYTimes we are talking about. Plus, having personally spent $100K on adwords and realizing how few terms I use in the grand scheme, I actually would have guessed gains to be even larger than reported. Adwords is HUGE. Do the math on revenue yourself from 200,000,000 searches...
I'll throw some candy numbers at you real quick:
Say 50% of searches have an adword
and 25% of these searches get an ad click
and avg. cpc of these ads is 0.10 per click
Guess what... that would be $2.5 million revenue in 1 DAY! & Over 900 million in a year. Sure they have to pay partners but a huge chunk is left...
---
More and more people find adwords every day. The bids get cranked up as a result.
Google signs new partners daily.
The economy as a whole is doing just fine.
The number of Internet users & their usage time continues to rise yearly.
Also note that Adwords select was not available from the start of 2002.
It's not a lie. It adds up. Believe it.
But I do fear that the wars and SARS will seriosly affect Google.
The war is essentially over (much work to do -- but I fail to see how that will affect google), and SARS is being dealt with best we can. SARS substantially affecting google [negatively] should be the least of your worries... because at that point there would be much more to worry about besides the health of google.
Say 50% of searches have an adword
and 25% of these searches get an ad click
Is there any empirical evindence for this? Both figures seem quite high to me. My personal impression is that a very large majority of people is looking for non-commercial information.
The immense size of the system helps explain why taking on Google will not be easy. "Managing search at our scale is a very serious barrier to entry," Mr. Schmidt said.
Indeed! Who could finance something on this scale and still be resonably sure of retrieving their investment within a reasonable time frame? It seems that Google may have reached critical mass and become able to live on for years without fear of really serious competition.
The barriers to entry are high, but they are not insurmountable.
On another note to Visit Thailand - we are in the travel industry and we´ve just tripled our spend with Google. We´ve hardly noticed any drop in tourists at all.
The company last provided projections on February 6, 2003. Given its recent acquisitions, the company is now providing new estimates. Overture's first quarter 2003 projections remain unchanged. The following are Overture's estimates for the full year 2003, assuming completion of the AltaVista and FAST transactions, as planned:
2003
Consolidated revenue Over $1 billion
International revenue $120-$135 million
Web search/paid inclusion revenue $25-$30 million
Traffic acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue (TAC) 62%-64%
Income before tax (IBT) $80-$100 million
EPS $0.60-$0.70
EBITDA $120-$130 million
Overall, I think Google's accomplishment is fantastic for a privately held firm. That they have been able to delay an IPO this long will certainly maximize the return when they do go public. Hope GoogleGuy snagged a few options... :)
while still relatively new and much theorizing has taken place, search engine watch [searchenginewatch.com...] had some good points about the reasoning behind it.
if and when google chooses to use this as a source to display ads, that is a largely untouched source of additional advertising space (over a million users) not to mention the additional revenue from the bloggers who are paying fees, small as it may be.
whith some of the leading minds in their particular industry, i find it hard to believe that google would make a number such as this public without first doing serious crunching to make sure it was achievable... it would be a little embarrassing to miss the projected growth numbers by several million.
Is there any empirical evindence for this?
No, I was just trying to show that revenues easily run into 100's of millions of dollars.
I can tell you I do have one campaign that gets 32% CTR, and several at 5-10%. With up to 10 adwords on a page, I actually think 25% may be too conservative an estimate (especially when sponsored links show up). Personally I also think average CPC per adword is much higher than the 0.10 I used. As for the 50%, I could be way off. Fill in your own numbers.
Regardless you get 100's of millions with any sort of reasonable estimates. With adwords first hitting its stride later in 2002, a doubling+ makes sense for 2003.
It was all hypothetical though, yes.
[edited by: dkoller at 7:15 pm (utc) on April 13, 2003]
1986 $198 Million
1987 $346 Million
1988 $591 Million
1989 $809 Million
1990 $1.18 Billion
...
2002 $28.3 Billion
(source [microsoft.com ])
So Google currently is where Microsoft was between FY 1987 and FY 1988, and actually growing faster.
All the information I've seen on the network Google runs (the clusters specifically), indicates somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 servers. (+- a few thousand)
Some sources include lectures given as recently as last November by Google staff.
While I don't doubt Google could pull off almost a 400% increase in computing power in a short time, what I do doubt is the cooling capicity in the existing datacenters to handle that kind of very very very aggressive growth.
Can anyone point me to someplace I can confirm the NYT figure (or disproove my own)?
Mr. Page, a 30-year-old software designer...
That sounds wrong... Maybe understating his achievments just a tad...
The NY Times article is the 1st one that has had a new 'official' number from Google.
The last one put out was several years old...and, stories have been circulating with 'guesses' though - nothing straight from the horses mouth till this one.
>>When are they ever going to go public?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, richmond8
by your post count, you must be new
I'd stick to reading this forum - about the future Google IPO - to get a handle on when :)
it would be a little embarrassing to miss the projected growth numbers by several million.
Yes, except that google don't publish results as they are privately held.
