http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/corporate/tenthings.html
 

 
          Ten things that 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.
          Recognising 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 that we’ve learned from search to tackle even
          more challenges.
       
       
          As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide our actions.
       
       

 
          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 that it does – and you can hold us to that.
          (September 2009)
       

 
       

 
         
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 that 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 that 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 that our goal is to get people to 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 that 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 analyses 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 emails 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 operators, manufacturers and developers.
              
            
 
         
6.  
              
                 You can make money without doing evil.
    
                 Google is a business. The revenue that 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 programme 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 programmes 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
                       that you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person
                       reading them draw much higher click-through 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, 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 look-up 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 180 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 130 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 and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools,
                 people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages that
                 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 that 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 that
                 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 café 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 end point. We set
                  ourselves goals that 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 spelt
                  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 that 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 that things are becomes the driving force
                  behind everything that we do.