[News] google Philosophy
Our Philosophy
Ten things we know to be true
"The perfect search engine," says co-founder Larry Page, "would
understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you
want." When Google began, you would have been pleasantly surprised
to enter a search query and immediately find the right answer.
Google became successful precisely because we were better and
faster at finding the right answer than other search engines at
the time.
But technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the
web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will
never be solved, we continue to push the limits of existing
technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service
that anyone seeking information can access, whether they're at a
desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok. We've also taken the
lessons we've learned from search to tackle even more challenges.
As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide
our actions.
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user
experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet
browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great
care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than
our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is
clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search
results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only
clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not
distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we
believe they should work so well you don't have to consider how
they might have been designed differently.
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search. With one of the world's largest research groups
focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do
well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration
on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and
provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes
finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of
people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what
we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our
hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored
areas, and to help people access and use even more of the
ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
We know your time is valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on
the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. We may be
the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have
people leave our homepage as quickly as possible. By shaving
excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency
of our serving environment, we've broken our own speed records
many times over, so that the average response time on a search
result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each
new product we release, whether it's a mobile application or
Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern
web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of
individuals posting links on websites to help determine which
other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of
every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of
techniques, including our patented PageRank? algorithm, which
analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the best sources of
information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger,
this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point
of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein,
we are active in open source software development, where
innovation takes place through the collective effort of many
programmers.
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to
information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We're
pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile
services that help people all over the globe to do any number of
tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to
watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to
access Google search on a phone. In addition, we're hoping to fuel
greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a
free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness
that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does
Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new
mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for
carriers, manufacturers and developers.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from
offering search technology to companies and from the sale of
advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the
web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to
promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take
advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their
site content. To ensure that we're ultimately serving all our
users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of
guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
We don't allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless
they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that
ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are
relevant to what you wish to find – so it's possible that certain
searches won't lead to any ads at all.
We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy.
We don't accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your
ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text
ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher
clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser,
whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted
medium.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored
Link," so it does not compromise the integrity of our search
results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher
in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our
users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever
justify breaching that trust.
7. There's always more information out there.
Once we'd indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any
other search service, our engineers turned their attention to
information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was
just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as
adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory.
Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the
ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals,
billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers
continue looking into ways to bring all the world's information to
people seeking answers.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to
facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in
every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens of
countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve more
than half of our results to people living outside the United
States. We offer Google's search interface in more than 110
languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content
written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our
applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using
our translation tools, people can discover content written on the
other side of the world in languages they don't speak. With these
tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to
greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can
offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be
challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that
great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right
company culture – and that doesn't just mean lava lamps and
rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride
in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall
success. We put great stock in our employees – energetic,
passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative
approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual,
but as new ideas emerge in a cafe line, at a team meeting or at
the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with
dizzying speed – and they may be the launch pad for a new project
destined for worldwide use.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
We see being great at something as a starting point, not an
endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can't reach yet,
because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further
than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take
things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways.
For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well
for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled
typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell
checker.
Even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, finding an
answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate
needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them
with products and services that set new standards. When we
launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service
available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious – but that's
because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the
kinds of changes we seek to make, and we're always looking for new
places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant
dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force
behind everything we do.
Update: We first wrote these "10 things" several years ago. From
time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true.
We hope it does – and you can hold us to that. (September 2009)
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html
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