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Basically, our goal is to organize the world's
information and to make it universally accessible and useful. That's our
mission. |
Larry Page
Google |
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Google's 10 Guiding
Principles |
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①
Focus on the user and all
else will follow |
⑥
You
can make money without doing
evil |
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②
It's best to do one thing
really, really well |
⑦
There's always more
information out there |
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③
Fast is better than slow |
⑧
The
need for information crosses
all borders |
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④
Democracy on the web works |
⑨
You
can be serious without a
suit |
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⑤
You
don't need to be at your
desk to need an answer |
⑩
Great just isn't good enough |
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①
Focus
on the user and
all else will follow
Since the beginning, we've
focused on providing the best user experience possible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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. |
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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. |
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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 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.
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