Business Overview

As with its technology, Google has chosen to ignore conventional wisdom in designing its business. The company started with seed money from angel investors and brought together two competing venture capital firms to fund its first equity round. While the dotcom boom exploded around it and competitors spent millions on marketing campaigns to "build brand," Google focused instead on quietly building a better search engine.

The word quickly spread from one satisfied user to another. With superior search technology and a high volume of traffic at its Google.com site, Google's managers identified two initial opportunities for generating revenue: search services and advertising.

Google grows and business blooms

Over time, these two business lines evolved into complementary networks. Google AdWords advertisers create ads to drive qualified traffic to their sites and generate leads. Google publishing partners deliver those ads targeted to relevant search results powered by Google AdSense. With AdSense, the publisher shares in the revenue generated when readers click on the ads.

For sites wishing to have more control over their intranet or site searches, Google developed the Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure appliance that delivers accurate search results across any number of documents.

Google continues to think about ways in which technology can improve upon existing ways of doing business. New areas are explored, ideas prototyped and budding services nurtured to make them more useful to advertisers and publishers. However, no matter how distant Google's business model grows from its origins, the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.
Google AdWords for Advertisers

Google designed AdWords for advertisers who want to reach a qualified audience as efficiently as possible. Advertisers select their own target keywords and only pay when customers click on their ads. It's easy to create ad text and manage online advertising accounts with no large upfront payment required. All that's needed is five minutes and a credit card. The ads appear across Google's growing roster of partners, including thousands of sites from America Online to the Washington Post, and are targeted to relevant search and content pages.

Google's experienced sales and service team optimize campaigns for our larger advertisers. Our staff of AdWords experts work with advertisers to select the appropriate keywords and generate the matching creative, then carefully monitor the campaign to improve its performance over time by winnowing keywords and rewriting copy based on what is most effective. There's no limit to the number of keywords that an advertiser can select and each keyword can be matched with a different creative execution. Recent advertisers include Amazon, Cisco Systems and Staples.

Google provides all of its advertisers with a full complement of reporting services to enable fine tuning of campaigns and real-time intelligence about which components are performing best. Advertisers can further increase efficiencies by targeting their campaigns to specific geographies or languages.
Google AdSense and Web Site Services

Google believes relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content. And that advertising can enhance the experience for visitors to a publisher's website, while helping publishers recover some of their investment in creating content of value. Google AdSense™ combines Google Search technology with our base of keyword advertisers to deliver ads that precisely target search results or the content on a site's pages, no matter how specialized the subject matter. Advertisers, publishers, and information seekers all profit as a result.

Signing up for AdSense is easy -- it only takes a few minutes to apply. And our sales team helps customize the program for sites receiving more than 20 million page views a month.

* AdSense serves relevant ads on content pages search result and content pages as well as dormant domain pages.Google Search Services enable publishers to provide Google web search on their own pages – results that can be used to generate revenue with the AdSense for Search program The Google Search Appliance, a scalable and secure device that provides Google quality search across an individual website or intranet.
* Google Wireless Services deliver Google search results via PDAs, wireless phones and other mobile devices powered by many of the world's leading wireless service providers.