Google Is Cool

As economists and pundits wet themselves with glee over the announcement that internet search engine Google will be filing for an initial public offering later this year, you may be asking yourself one very salient question: "So?"

Whether Google's IPO will rain money from the sky or go down as yet another dot-bomb remains to be seen. But Google is already an improbable success story with all the internet-era trimmings.

The little company that was started by Stanford dropouts Larry Page and Sergey Brin is now the largest and most powerful search engine in a web dominated by Microsoft and Yahoo. Most amazingly, they did it all without being evil.

"Don't be evil" is the corporate mantra around Google HQ, and their business decisions over the years have proven it. In 1998, when Google started, it was the year of the "portal," when their competitors were all crowding their homepages with so much junk it became hard to even find the search box. Google kept their homepage pristine -- a blank white page with one simple box and two buttons: Google Search and "I'm Feeling Lucky" which, when clicked, takes you directly to the top result for your query. The layout has hardly changed in six years.

When their competitors began mixing paid placement listings with actual search results, Google stayed pure, drawing a clear line between search results and advertising. The rest of the major search engines still make their results pages a morass of paid advertisements and actual search results, supplied by placement payola company Overture. Try a search for "hotel" in the top search engines and you can see just how crowded they are with paid placements (see graphic). Google is still the best place to get the content you came for, not what marketers want you to see.

Speaking of advertisements, Google was the first major company to pioneer text-only advertisements on their pages. While other companies filled their pages with flashing banner ads screaming, "punch the monkey" with epileptic frequency, Google's ads were a breath of fresh, text-based air. And they found that, when you don't annoy the user with flashing graphics, they're actually more likely to click your ad.

As their IPO filing proves, Google now makes most of its money from its advertising programs, AdSense and AdWords. AdWords is wonderfully democratic: Anyone can buy an ad that will appear around certain keywords (though the ad is clearly separated from the search results). People who make websites can also sign up to display the Google AdSense ads, and make a pretty penny from clickthroughs, too.

There has been controversy in this department. When webzine Unknown News decided to advertise their "Who would Jesus Bomb?" bumper sticker, the ad was initially rejected by Google because their policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain "language that advocates against an individual, group, or organization," a policy intended to vet hate sites.

After a passionate email exchange with Unknown News, Google relented and the ad went online. Google walks a tough line, legally and ethically. They are, after all, in the business of organizing all the world's information. But at least in this case, when confronted with the truth, they show a willingness to learn from their mistakes.

Outside of advertising, Google's core business is search, and they still do it better than anyone else. Google's search results are created by a complicated secret algorithm called PageRank. What sets Google's PageRank apart from the imitators is that it takes the social aspect of web pages into account.

When Google started, most search engines were simply indexing web pages -- making an internal record of what words appeared on which pages. So, if you searched for "great idea," you'd get a list of pages that all contained the phrase "great idea." Great idea, right?