Main article: Google's hoaxes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes—such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web.[137] In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine.[138] In 2004, they featured Google Lunar (which claimed to feature jobs on the moon),[139] and in 2005, a fictitious brain-boosting drink, termed Google Gulp was announced.[140] In 2006, they came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service.In 2007, Google announced two joke products. The first was a free wireless Internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider)[142] in which one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting only an hour for a "Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)" to connect it to the Internet.Additionally, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, which allows users of their free email service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address.

Google's services contain a number of Easter eggs; for instance, the Language Tools page offers the search interface in the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker" (actually leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, and Klingon.[144] In addition, the search engine calculator provides the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[145] As Google’s search box can be used as a unit converter (as well as a calculator), some non-standard units are built in, such as the Smoot. A newly discovered easter egg is the spell-checker's result for the properly spelled word "recursion". The spell-checker built into Google search returns "Did you mean: recursion?" in a recursive link back to the same page.[146] Google also routinely modifies its logo in accordance with various holidays or special events throughout the year, such as Christmas, Mother's Day, or the birthdays of various notable individuals.her logo switches are based on search terms. For instance, if the term "ascii art" (all lower-case required) is searched, an ASCII art version of the Google logo will appear next to the search

Googleplex

The Googleplex

Main article: Googleplex

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, is referred to as "the Googleplex" in a play of words; a googolplex being 1010100, or a one followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and drinks.

Sign at the Googleplex

In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet (28,900 m2) of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan.[128] The office was specially designed and built for Google and houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL.[128] In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others.It is estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area.In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh. By late 2006, Google also established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.Google has faced accusations in Harper's Magazine[132] of being extremely excessive with their energy usage, and were accused of employing their "Don't be evil" motto as well as their very public energy saving campaigns as means of trying to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy their servers actually require.

In 2009 Google announced it was deploying herds of goats to keep grassland around the Googleplex short, helping to prevent the threat from seasonal bush fires while also reducing the carbon footprint of mowing the extensive grounds

Corporate affairs and culture

Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Google is known for its informal corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."

Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards. For example, some system administrators earn no more than $35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market.However, Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth.

After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, "their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of $150,000.[dubious – discuss]

They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of $18.5 billion each.

In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007. In March 2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities. Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of Facebook while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO of Netshops Inc.

Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores "personal information for 18 months" and by comparison, AOL (Time Warner) "retain[s] search requests for 13 months", and Yahoo! 90 days.

U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google. Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to protect YouTube users' personal data in the $1 billion copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it will make user information and Internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League. The deal however did not extend the anonymity to employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be made available to the court.

Main article: Google platform

Google runs its services on several server farms, each comprising thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company divulges no details of its hardware, a 2006 estimate cites 450,000 servers, "racked up in clusters at data centers around the world. " The company has about 24 server farms around the world of various configurations. The farm in The Dalles, Oregon is powered by hydroelectricity at about 50 megawatts.

Main article: Google Books

Google indexes a number of books and reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada.The Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009, asking them to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from their database. In competition with Amazon.com, Google plans to sell digital versions of new books.

Google entered the enterprise market in February 2002 with the launch of its Google Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology to larger organizations.Providing search for a smaller document repository, Google launched the Mini in 2005.

Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers with an advertising-free window into Google.com's index. In 2008, Google re-branded its next version of Custom Search Business Edition as Google Site Search.

In 2007, Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a version of Google Apps targeted primarily at the business user. It includes such extras as more disk space for e-mail, API access, and premium support, for a price of $50 per user per year. A large implementation of Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Also in 2007, Google acquired Postini and continued to sell the acquired technology as Google Security Services

Main article: Gmail

Gmail, known in the United Kingdom and Germany as Google Mail, is a free webmail, POP3 and IMAP service provided by Google. It was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004, and became available to the general public as a beta product on February 7, 2007. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite, at which time it had 146 million users monthly.[citation needed]. With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7400 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 20 GB to 1 TB available for $5 to $256 (US) per year.

Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique.

Gmail runs on Google Servlet Engine and Google GFE/1.3 which run on Linux

The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant search engine in the US market, with a market share of 65.6%.Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.

In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which allowed users to both upload videos, and search and watch videos from the larger Internet. In 2009 uploads to Google video were discontinued.

Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.

Google has promoted their products in various ways. In London, Google Space was set-up in Heathrow Airport, showcasing several products, including Gmail, Google Earth and Picasa.Also, a similar page was launched for American college students, under the name College Life, Powered by Google.

In 2007, some reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone. The project, called Android, turned out not to be a phone, but an operating system. It provides a standard development kit that will allow any "Android" phone to run software developed for the Android SDK, no matter the phone manufacturer. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the first phone running the Android platform, the G1.

Google Translate aka Google Language Tools is a server-side machine translation service, which can translate 35 different languages to each other, forming 595 language pairs. Browser extension tools (such as Firefox extensions) allow for easy access to Google Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques from translated documents, (such as United Nations documents,[citation needed] which are professionally translated) to extract translations accurate up to 88 percent. A "suggest a better translation" feature appears with the original language text in a pop-up text field, allowing users to indicate where the current translation is incorrect or else inferior to another translation.

On 1 September 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google Chrome, an open-source web browser,[96] which was released on 2 September 2008.

On May 27, 2009, Google announced plans to develop Google Wave, a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and much more. Google Wave is currently still in what the company calls "preview mode," in which a potential user must request access from Google to be given a Wave account.

On 7 July 2009, Google announced the project to develop Google Chrome OS, an open-source Linux-based operating system in a "window of opportunity".

99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $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's advertisements carry a lower price tag when their human ad-rating team working around the world believes the ads improve the company's user experience.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 began in March 2009 to use behavioral targeting based on users' interests.

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.

In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on their web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November, 2008.