SWOT Analysis for Google

Introduction

Google history is dated back in 1997 when two students were doing their project for a PhdD course at Stanford. According to The Economist (2004), “Sergey and Larry registered the company google.com the following year as a privately owned company doing broad research on search engines and technology.” Since its inception, google has successfully managed to establish its brand in internet search more than any other search engine. Its dominance in the US alone is about seventy five percent of the market, though it has to compete with other players in the market (Anonymous, 2005). In response to the growing demand in the market, google has continued to expand massively as well as changing its business model so as to remain the best search engine.

SWOT analysis

Strengths

Google has established itself as a leading brand among the search engines among all the uses in the globe, users can rely on it because of its speed to execute search questions. Google already enjoys being marketed by the users person by person, hence the company does very little to market itself. Google has hired the best professionals in technology who continuously research algorithms to make searching faster. Of all the internet searches carried out in the US, over seventy five percent of the users use google and the same proportion worldwide. Google uses eighty eight languages in its interface thereby, enabling more users across the globe to use it. Apart from search engines, google has established other innovative services like news and android phones (Bono, E. and Heller, (2005).

Weakness

According to Bono, E. and Heller (2005), “Google faces threats from spammers who create replica sites with link pages so that they can manipulate googles’ ranking.” According to some researchers, google did not use the best criteria in detecting traffic of internet searches. Despite being the most used searching tool it does not give one hundred of the percent answers to queries. Its business model is complicated making it difficult to collect revenue.

Opportunities

According to Hanley (2003), “Google can provide full services to its users using the mobile phone rather than the limited services that they currently offer.” Google can start engaging in multimedia business and print media. Google can capitalize on the ability to personalize searching and list local advertisers who pay for their services.

Threats

Other competitors may emerge in future with better brands and high speed searches thereby posing a threat to its existence. In the event that AOL, terminates its contract with google, a big chunk of the revenue would be lost because it partially relies on it for operation. Google faces enmity and competition from other search engines (Hanley, 2003).

Discussion

One of the products that google has brought to the market is google news. In this service, latest news shown on several news sites are covered within a period of thirty days. The news was available in over nineteen languages as of July, 2008. Over twenty five thousand publishers get a chance for their content to be aggregated. Another product that google is engaged in is the Android mobile phones. According to The Economist (2004), “Android contains integrated software packages that include an operating system, middleware and important applications.” In the year 2010, Android smart phones were the best selling worldwide according to Canalys.

Despite competition in the market, I am convinced google can succeed in selling the above two products that I have mentioned. This is due to the fact that google has taken time in the past to build the reputation of its brand as the best search engine thereby, attracting a large clientele. Through its strategy to employ the best experts in technology, google is able to release competitive products into the market; therefore, it remains the favorite market leader.

Conclusion

Google should not merge with market portals but should go it alone because it may limit their growth. Because google has excellent experts of technology, it should take advantage and provide one hundred percent search results and other reliable services and products (Koller, 2004).

References

Anonymous, (2005). Google’s Grand Ambitions. Bloomberg Business Week, Web.

Bono, E. and Heller, R. (2005) “SWOT: Assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your business with SWOT analysis”. Web.

Hanley, R. (2003). From Googol to Google: The Stanford Daily (Stanford University).

Koller, D. (2004). Origin of the name “Google”. Stanford University.

The Economist (2004) “The weakness of Google”. Web.