Jul
23
- Chris Braund
- 23/Jul/2010 13:11
Originally called ‘BackRub’ Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google whilst at Stanford University (in 1996). The creators soon changed its name to Google- a play on the word ‘googol’, a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
But that’s enough of the history lesson; Google’s now a search engine with incredible power, both technically and in terms of marketing. A business will ignore Google at its peril. A demonstration of this was shown on September 5th by Google’s ‘doodle’ (the picture that often replaces the word Google, left). Web users were baffled because it did not appear to represent a specific event or launch, both of which are the usual reasons behind special Google doodle. Instead, clicking on the image of the UFO took the user to a search for the term "unexplained phenomenon". Web users were clicking in their millions curious of what was happening; wondering if this is a precursor to some viral event or even if was tied to the release of District 9 (a film). After much drama, a few days later Google explained it was in honour of a 1980’s Japanese video game called Zero Wing.
This demonstrated to all of us one aspect of the huge marketing power of Google should they choose to exploit it. They could make millions by, for example, partnering with Nintendo prior to launching their new handheld console, the Nintendo 3DS, promoting the console as their doogle.