How Does Google Work?
Google is one of the world’s most widely used search engines, handling billions of searches every day. The company offers a wide range of other services as well, from email to photo storage and mapping. It also produces a number of physical products, including the Pixel smartphone line, Chromecast in-home streaming devices and the Nest smart home device. Its work and productivity software, formerly known as G-Suite, includes the popular Docs, Sheets, Slides and Mail apps.
Google’s ethos of “don’t be evil” guides the way it does business and how it treats its employees. The company is also committed to environmental sustainability, with its data centers powered by renewable energy. The company has been criticised over the privacy of its users, concerns that it uses other people’s intellectual property and for monopolistic practices.
In 1998, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google Inc. to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the internet. The company name is a play on the word googol, a number created by computer programmer Ken Thompson in 1961 to represent a large number (see below).
The company’s earliest servers were constructed from Lego, and its first logo was a stick figure with a question mark for a head, inspired by the Burning Man festival. Later, it adopted a logo that features a colorful interlocking Google letters. The company headquarters, dubbed “The Googleplex,” is located in Mountain View, California, in the United States. The company has 86 offices worldwide, with 32 in North America (including the Googleplex), 24 in Europe, and five in Asia Pacific.
To handle the volume of searches and other traffic, Google has built massive data centers around the globe, each of which contains several hundred thousand servers. The company has developed its own file system, Bigtable and MapReduce to manage the huge volumes of data. The system works by storing the information in “chunks” on multiple computers, then aggregating them into higher-level data sets.
Adding reviews to your website can encourage customers to visit and give your business a better chance of being found online. It is important to make sure that reviews are genuine, however. Fake reviews can have a negative impact on your business and will be removed by Google if they are reported.
You can use the Google review ‘link’ tool to report fake reviews and ask for them to be removed. You can also contact Google support for help if you have any problems. Reviews that include obscene language, incite violence or hatred against an individual or group based on their race, nationality, ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability will not be allowed. You can find out more about what kinds of reviews are acceptable by reading the Google guidelines on their website.
