STORY OF ORKUT

Google has quietly released a social networking service called orkut, named after Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google software engineer who developed the project during personal time allowed to him by Google.

All employees at Google are allowed to spend twenty percent of their time working on personal interests, a policy Google has to encourage creativity. Buyukkokten had an interest in social networking and so developed his service, Google says. Now the company has decided to open it to the public.

The move comes in the wake of rumors that Google wanted to buy social networking service Friendster last year and just a day after Eurekster launched, a social network service that refines search results. Is this a sign that Google plans to use social networking for search?

"We're going to watch this and see how people react to it," said Google spokesperson David Krane.

So we'll see. But Krane also stressed that the system is staying very informal, somewhat similar to when Google puts a "beta" moniker on products like Google Catalogs or Google Labs projects that may never actually make it into Google as a long-term offering.

"This service is in affiliation with Google, but it's a product of this 20 percent engineering time and something we haven't made a formal commitment to," Krane said.

Krane said the service currently has no monetization -- no ads are appearing on it from Google, nor is there a fee charged to join.

And how to join? It's invitation only. At the moment, most of those within the system are employees at Google or know employees at Google. So while the system is open to the public, it's really that the public now knows it exists. To be part of it, you'll have to hope that someone you know is within it and invites you to take part.

So is the launch a sign that Google really did want Friendster, and perhaps has decided to go this route as an alternative? Google won't comment on the Friendster rumor, saying only that it does have an interest in social networking, that the timing of this product is simply coincidental and that its exact plans for social networking remain to be determined.

"We think [social networking] is promising, but we don't have any near term commitments to it at all," Krane said.

GOOGLE began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web

 pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally, the search engine used theStanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 7 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

The name "Google" originated from a common misspelling of the word "googol",which refers to 10¹⁰⁰, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google", was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112 million in licensing and other revenues. Google is able to precisely track users' interests across affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology and Google Analytics. Google AdWords allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google's search results and the Google Content Network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. Google AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked. Google has also been criticized by advertisers regarding its inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script is used to generate a charge on an advertisement without really having an interest in the product. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.

As an interesting motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University,Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that half of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.