A Brief History Of Google As A Bedtime Story

I thought a while this morning what to write about, and I found an interesting story. it is called “A Brief History Of Google”. I liked the tone of it and I read it in its entirety. Here it is:

“Google was incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who’d met as doctoral students at Stanford University in 1995. They’d started working on a search engine that analyzed the relationships (links) between Web sites (rather than ranking results based on number of times the search term appeared on a page), and created BackRub, the precursor to Google, in 1996. By mid-year of 1998, they’d renamed their company Google.

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What books are you reading?

By books I mean either paper or electronic book. I am trying to learn some new stuff so, these days, I am reading “Winning on the Web: The Executive Pocket Guide to SMARTER MARKETING“. It is a very interesting book with some nice points of view. Let us look at some excerpts:

“Web site analysis is an absolute no-brainer to embark on, but it also creates a hurdle: without relevant information and clear, understandable reports, web site data is like all the books in the library dumped in one big pile on the floor. All the information is there — you just can’t find or use it.

[...]

Understanding what to analyze and what actions to take as a result is the new science of the new marketing world. Marketing campaigns today must be designed to be measured, analyzed and iteratively improved. The Web now makes sophisticated analysis much more possible and accessible to marketing organizations of all sizes and budgets.”

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Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

I’ll continue the series that started last week with another friend blogger, Nathan Rice. Here is a quick excerpt from his About page:

So this blog is for you. From regular Joe bloggers to professional theme developers, hopefully you will find tips and tricks here that will help you make the blogs you work on BETTER. If there are any questions you have about web design or WordPress theme development, feel free to suggest topics for future posts here on the blog. I’d be happy to consider them and see what I can do.

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Every single time a visitor comes to your web site, a brand interaction occurs.

Whether their web site visit results in a brand building or brand eroding opportunity depends on your visitors’ experience on your site. For marketers to dismiss the Web as a direct response medium alone, or a glorified electronic brochure, and not understand the larger brand impact of these collective visits, is a huge mistake.

Why?

Because to customers and prospects, all brand interactions are not equal—and yet they all have a long-term impact on brand perception. Certain interactions are weighted more heavily than others. A quick glimpse at a poorly executed print ad or view of a broadcast ad can be quickly dismissed and the brand impact is not large from that single exposure. However, an unsuccessful visit to your web site is interactive and intentional on the visitor’s part, and thus can have a stronger negative branding impact. Imagine the result of one million unsuccessful web site visits per week on a brand over just a few months.

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