Is the bubble about to burst for Google?

Google has been blessed with some of the most positive press in the computing scene, but is this and its success likely to change anytime soon?

By Ian Osborne, 15 Feb 2007 at 12:29

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'Don't Be Evil'. The slogan has served Google well over the last decade. Since the company's inception at Stanford, California in 1995 to today's multi-billion-dollar concern, Google's unique business culture has resulted in a largely positive press. But can this love affair with the media, computer buffs and industry insiders alike be sustained, or is the bubble about to burst? Let's take a look at how Google grew to be so well appreciated, and why this may soon change.

Google's founders, Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began not by spotting a gap in the market, but in identifying a weakness in the rapidly-growing internet. At the time, searching the net's already-burgeoning mass of information was a problematic exercise. The search engines of the day performed poorly, producing masses of results which often buried the useful sites under a rockslide of trivial or barely-relevant material. Page and Brin set to work on the problem, and came up with a solution that was brilliant in its simplicity...

Where previous efforts ranked sites according to how many times a searched-for term cropped up, their own search engine also checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. The pages with the most backlinks were deemed the most important ones. They were right. Google was soon the most popular search engine on the web.

Plaudits soon followed. While Google.com was still in beta, it was answering 10,000 searches a day and articles about Google appeared in USA Today and Le Monde. In December 1998, PC Magazine named Google as one of its top 100 web sites and search engines. Further expansion has brought Google searches to mobile devices, incorporated Deja.com's vast archive of newsgroup posts under the Google umbrella and inspired a free software bundle that brought open-source applications to the newbie masses. And this was just the beginning.

The media plaudits soon came thick and fast. In 1999, Google won a technical excellence award for innovation in web application development from PC Magazine, and was included in several 'best of' lists, culminating with Google's appearance on Time magazine's top ten best cybertech list. The site was awarded both a Webby Award and a People's Voice Award for technical achievement in May 2000. The founders' unpretentious, five-word acceptance speech, "We love you, Google users", did much to endear them to the computer-using population. And as the company grew, the positive press just kept on coming...

So how did Google achieve and, more importantly sustain, such positive press coverage? At the heart of the company's success is its laid-back office culture, with its distinct lack of corporate pretentiousness having a knock-on effect on the way Google interacts with the rest of the world. When the company moved into its new office building known as the Googleplex, large rubber exercise balls were used as highly mobile office chairs to maximise the flexibility of the workspace. In Google's earliest days, desks were wooden doors mounted on two sawhorses. Some of these are still in use within the engineering group. Google's directors sat around a ping pong table during board meetings. Large dogs were allowed to roam the halls, and sections of the car park are roped off for twice-weekly games of roller hockey. Other recreational facilities include a workout room with weights and a rowing machine, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, football, a baby grand piano, a pool table and ping pong. Presumably on the boardroom table.