Advantages

So how did a little business that started in a garage, have grown into the international conglomerate that it is today? Well, Google first attracted a loyal following with its simple design and useful results. In 2000, Google began selling ads in keywords from their results. The ads were text-based instead of the popular banner ads, to avoid cluttering the page and to maximize loading speed. That's how Google survived the burst of the dot-com bubble, and grew to adapt and expand to other revenue generating fields. The willingness to experiment and take chances, kinda like 20th Century Fox.

For example, their motivation technique called Innovation Time Off, where all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interests them. They still work on projects so the company doesn't loss money. And it's quite effective as well, since services like Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated during Innovation Time Off. Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that half of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.

They've also got creative methods of getting free publicity like Google's tradition of April Fool's Day jokes such as Google MentalPlex, which searched the web with mental powers, the claim that pigeons were the secret behind thier search engine, Google Lunar, which featured jobs on the moon, the brain-boosting Google Gulp, online dating service called Google Romance, the TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) which got connections by flushing one end of a cable down the toilet and waiting for a PHD (Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher) to connect you, and finally, Gmail Paper, which allows users to email messages printed and shipped to any address. Google also uses more traditional techniques like Easter eggs; for example, the Language Tools offers search interface in the "Swedish Chef"'s "Bork bork bork", pig latin, l3375P33K, Elmer Fudd, and Klingon. The search engine calculator gives the anser to life, the universe and everything from the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (the answer is 42). Google routinely modifies its logo to suit various holidays and events.