How does Google make $$$$$$

[dog2525]

So when it comes to marketing and all this stuff i always clueless. But lately I was wondering how does google make money. It's one of the fastest growing company out there. And its Free! I understand how MS does it, charging 400 bucks for a cd and a serial number. Can someone explain this to me. How does a company make cash when all of its products are free?

[Nova]

google does more then just that, but my guess is companies pay google to put them at the top of the list when searches are done. i mean when was the last time you did a search for something and checked everything up to page 20 or beyond.

[stlouis1]

well just last week i checked 20 pages of search results looking for jenna jameson pictures :redeye:

[Zefram]

Well google is mainly successful because company are paying big bucks to google for ads. If you notice those 'google sponsored links' then you know what i'm talking about. This ads have infested a lot of website and yes, it does make appearance here in the PCstats forum.
That's exactly why i'm blocking traffic from google - and eliminate the ads ;)

And as google puts it in their CORPORATE PROFILE (http://www.google.com.my/intl/en/corporate/index.html);
Google's utility and ease of use have made it one of the world's best known brands almost entirely through word of mouth from satisfied users. As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it. We believe you should know when someone has paid to put a message in front of you, so we always distinguish ads from the search results or other content on a page. We don't sell placement in the search results themselves, or allow people to pay for a higher ranking there.

Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products and services on the web with targeted advertising, and we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.

Microsoft as a big company have a lot of employees, product mix and a lot of 'taxes' to deal with. If you look at Microsoft Corp Stock Profile (http://finance.google.com/finance?q=MSFT) notice that they had 71,000 employees and their gross profits for 2006 (annually) is around 36,000 Million US$
Google Inc. (http://finance.google.com/finance?q=GOOG), on the other hand have around 10,674 employees and their gross profits is 6,379 Million US$.
And Microsoft have many investors, way more than google........... this makes google almost 'care-free', where they are not pressurized by all those investors. Microsoft have to deal with a lot of investors and when Vista are late for couple of months investors start sandbagging the Microsoft ppl. :p
Microsoft Ownership (http://moneycentral.msn.com/ownership?Symbol=MSFT)
Google Ownership (http://moneycentral.msn.com/ownership?Symbol=GOOG)