The Competitive Environment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Competitive Environment - Essay Example Going back further in time, it was a United States government-funded research project some sixty years ago called the ARPANET that eventually gave rise to the present Internet. It was originally a defense-related project of the Advanced Research Project Agency of the U.S. military to develop a wide-area network of communications that is redundant and designed to withstand a nuclear attack during the Cold War period. It was developed at great cost but the American government saw it fit to give it away for free for civilian uses, similar to the so-called Star Wars Project or the Strategic Defense Initiative which is the precursor to the global positioning system (GPS) used widely in most consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones. The main brains behind the ARPANET was a guy named Vannevar Bush who foresaw an information overload that many people experience. It was first brought up in an article he wrote in which he argued for some form of oversight or a content curator who will see to it that information published on the Web is credible, reliable, and trustworthy; anybody can publish anything without proper verification, and Web content is crucial when people go on-line to look for some information they need. This paper is a discussion of the role that search engines or browsers play when people search or look for information on the Web. Search engines perform a crucial function in this regard as it determines what the search results will be. Although there were many search engines that preceded today's giant Google, the way the search process was performed was very different back then but Google managed to alter everything through its highly-secret algorithm. An end result of this new way of conducting the search is that Google wholly dominates the market. Discussion Google has closely guarded its secret algorithm that produces search engine results, which it rightfully considers as proprietary in nature. As more and more people get connected on-line, di gital presence is essential for business firms to survive. Google has dominated this market in just ten-years' time because it altered the way how browsers crawl the vast Internet for the information typed in by people on their search box. Previously, search engines looked for the titles of articles only or the Web addresses of Internet sites but Google's process does it much differently, by looking at the actual content of Web pages posted on the Internet. This had big or profound effects, one of which was lower the price of a unique domain name considerably. The new search process led to search engine optimization techniques that try to influence the search results being produced but Google changes its algorithm to obviate this technique. It is important to do this occasionally to have unbiased results based on page rankings. Landing on top of page rankings has considerable business consequence because people tend to look only at the first few top results and ignore other lower-ra nked results. This also has a considerable effect on the profits of Google which relies on on-line advertising revenues to a big extent and indirectly, on the businesses that advertise on-line as more people shift to their purchases through on-line transactions because of improvements in Internet security such as the use of the secure-socket layer (SSL) that encrypts crucial personal information. Google came to dominate the search engine market