1.
Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we've
focused on providing the best user experience possible.
Customer
Care
Value Innovation
Whether
we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of
the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately
serve you,
rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage
interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly.
Placement in search
results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly
marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting.
And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should
work so well you don't have to consider how they might have been
designed differently.
2. It's
best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search. With one of
the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving
search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it
better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've
been able to solve complex issues and provide
continuous improvements
to a service that already makes finding information a fast and
seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to
improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products,
like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search
to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use
even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast
is better than slow.
We know your time is
valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on the web you want it
right away – and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the
world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as
quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages
and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we've
broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average
response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep
speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it's a
mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast
enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all
go even faster.
4.
Democracy on the web works.
Google search works
because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on
websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.
We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200
signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™
algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been "voted" to be the
best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the
web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site
is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In
the same vein, we are active in open source software development,
where
innovation
takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.
5. You
don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly
mobile: people want access to information wherever they are,
whenever they need it. We're pioneering new technologies and
offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over
the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking
email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the
several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In
addition, we're hoping to fuel greater
innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free,
open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped
the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit
consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile
experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers,
manufacturers and developers.
6. You
can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The
revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to
companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and
on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers
worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of
thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to
deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we're
ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or
not), we have a set of guiding
principles for our advertising programs and practices.
7.
There's always more information out there.
Once we'd indexed more of
the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our
engineers turned their attention to information that was not as
readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating
new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address
lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more
creativity,
like adding the ability to search news archives,
patents, academic
journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our
researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world's
information to people seeking answers.
8. The
need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in
California, but our
mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire
world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens
of countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve
more than half of our results to people living outside the United
States. We offer Google's search interface in more than 110
languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content
written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our
applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using
our translation tools, people can discover content written on the
other side of the world in languages they don't speak. With these
tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to
greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can
offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.
9. You
can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google
around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge
should be fun.
We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen
with the
right company culture
– and that doesn't just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is
an emphasis on
team
achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute
to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees –
energetic,
passionate
people from
diverse backgrounds with
creative
approaches to
work, play, and life.
Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café
line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and
put into practice with dizzying speed – and they may be the launch
pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.
10.
Great just isn't good enough.
We see being great at
something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves
goals
we know we can't reach yet, because we know that by
stretching
to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through
innovation
and
iteration,
we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in
unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that
search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how
it handled typos. That led him to create an
intuitive
and more helpful spell checker.