Ways Google Innovative Technologies Have Changed the World

Google Innovation How Google's Innovative Technologies Have Changed the World The Google founders deliberately designed and continually fuel a corporate culture that puts innovation at the center, acting as a highly effective catalyst for creating new products and services. One of the foundational elements of their culture is the Rule of 20%, which gives engineers the flexibility of spending up to 20% of their time on projects they are interested in transforming from concept to finished product (Laffey, 2007).

Since instituting this program at the launch of the company, products and services generated from its successful use has delivered 56% of total revenues to Google on an annual basis (MIT Sloan Review, 2006). Google Docs, Gmail, personal search, Google+, Android operating systems, Goggles (visual search) and Latitude are all the result of the Rule of 20% Program (Manyika, 2009). Taken together, Google's technologies have made a major impact on the world, and their pace of innovation is changing the nature of the new product and services development process itself as well (Deegan, 2008).

Google Innovations That Are Transforming The World The concept of having semantic search that can quickly and thoroughly index the Web was originated by Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin when both were graduate students at Stanford University. They were working on their dissertations and wanted to sort academic references by those that had been most and least referenced. There was no approach to accomplish this in any of the academic search engines and online databases.

Larry Page and Sergei Brin devised an algorithm that would take into account these variations, and the beginnings of the PageRank algorithm was formed (Laffey, 2007). Over time, the founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin refined the PageRank algorithm with the core concepts of a technique called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which serves as the foundation of their search engine today (Senior, 2005).

LSI has served as the Launchpad of dozens of new product and service ideas, incouding the highly profitable AdWords and AdSense programs which generate nearly 50% of all profits for the company in any given quarter (Gopalakrishnan, Kessler, Scillitoe, 2010). LSI technology has also powered the development of Google Goggles, the visual search engine that can search by attributes of a photograph.

Google's product management team has also said that the future of LSI technology will be to create contextual search that will present only results most relevant to a given person's interests, needs and preferences (Gopalakrishnan, Kessler, Scillitoe, 2010). In many respects the advances Google has made on LSI technology and the future direction toward contextual search will be an even bigger impact globally than their existing innovations combined (Cho, 2009).

The rapid advances in cloud computing including Google AppEngine, a cloud application development platform (Deegan, 2008) the development of Google Docs and the Google Cloud drive due out in 2012 (Brown, 2011) and the many diverse applications will all be unified through contextual search. The ability to selectively define which of these applications are best suited for a given task or need will be guided by the user interface and options in Google, further optimizing the user experience.

All of these innovations taken together have made it possible for small businesses to go from being constrained by their geographic location to becoming global. These innovations have also made it possible for students to learn on a global scale, not just constrained by a given area of the country or world they happen to be attending classes at. The aggregate or strategic effect of these innovations has been to further accelerate knowledge and learning transfer across broad geographic, cultural, economic and political boundaries.

While many applaud the efforts of Facebook and Twitter to support those seeking freedom in Egypt and other nations, in reality it is the smooth and fluid flow of ideas and intelligence that is a far brighter and longer-burning spark of freedom. Google, by becoming a catalyst of knowledge and new venture creation by concentrating on the Rule of 20% and the continual refinement of their PageRank algorithm based on LSI technology, has created one of the strongest innovation engines globally today (Cho, 2009).

With such a strong catalyst and processes of innovation in place, Google is continually creating new disruptive directions in mobile, location-based services incouding Latitude, Maps and advanced navigational tools (Cho, 2009). Google has also created an experimental car that drives itself and can navigate through entire mount ranges on its own using positioning coordinates (Brown, 2011). Eventually Google believes their technology can be used for optimizing traffic flow across congested cities globally, in addition to minimizing fatal accidents by ensuring distances between cars are kept safe.

These technologies only in the formative stages today are destined to also revolutionize transportation and how consumers and businesses booth interact with each other on the road, online and in person as well. Implicit in the many innovations that Google has created however is a strong focus on being hardware platform-independent allowing applications and systems to be used across a broad array of devices (Manyika, 2009).

This is the basis of the Android operating system which as of the close of 2011 was netting out nearly 450,000 installs a day according to the Wall Street Journal and other popular media. Android is also the operating system the company will rely on to create a got-o-market strategy for its tablet-based applications now under development (Gopalakrishnan, Kessler, Scillitoe, 2010). Google envisions having tablet-based systems in cars eventually, using real-time mapping and knowledge management systems to enable greater flexibility and freedom in personal transportation as well (Brown,.