Year 2011 for Google

An article by Amit Roushan    No Comments

As the year passed by, there was much advancement in the World Wide Web. Most likely, the year 2011 proved to be a year for Google. Google acquired a number of companies, came up with various new products, and enhanced the one already present. As a whole, Google saw some pretty impressive statistics this year.

As a major change, in April, co-founder Larry Page repalced Eric Schmidt as CEO of the company. Schmidt took on the role of Executive Chairman, with Sergey Brin taking on the title of Co-Founder.

It was for sure a busy year for Google with so many changes that they made. Here we look into a few areas when Google made the headlines:

Google goes Social with Google+

The highlight for Google in the year 2011 would definitely be Google+. Finally, Google made a serious attempt to fight Facebook to give it a run for its money in the social networking arena with Google+. The initial response was impressive with Google+ getting 10 million users in its first few weeks. Google+ which boasted of various features like Circles, Hangouts and Spark was later integrated with Games following the steps of Facebook. After the initial response, Google+ saw drastic decrease in the traffic as reports suggest 40-50% drop in public posting in Google+. As you read this, you might remember you too have a Google+ account which you really don’t care about.

It seems Google+ has a long way to go to catch up with Facebook or even Twitter when it comes to Social media. But with the power Google acquires in the World Wide Web, they can really make people stick with Google+.

Google Acquisitions along with Motorola

2011 was also a big year for Google for its acquisition reason. Google invested in acquiring around 25 companies. A few to name would be DailyDeal ($114 million), Beatthatquote.com ( $58 million), Zagat ($151 million), Talkbin, Zynamics, fflick ( $10 million) , Sage TV etc. These companies were integrated with various Google products like Youtube, Google+, Google Maps, Blogger etc.

Among the many, the most talked about was Motorola Mobility, a mobile device manufacturing company. Google bought the company for a whopping $12.5 billion. In a post on Google’s blog, Google Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Larry Page, revealed that Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility was a strategic move to strengthen Google’s patent portfolio. The Motorola Mobility acquisition is considered a means of protecting the viability of Android.

Google advances with Android

After the acquisition of Android Inc. in 2005, Google saw major advancement in the field of Android development.

On 1st of August 2011, reports suggested Android had about 48% of the smartphone market share. In October, 2011, Google announced that there were 190 million Android devices in the market. As of November 16, 2011, Google announced 200 million Android devices had been activated. On December 20, 2011, Andy Rubin announced that Google was activating 700,000 new Android devices daily.

Google came up with various releases of the Android version to create real-world product that improved the mobile experience for end users. Google released Gingerbread, Honeycomb and the latest Ice cream Sandwich. Ice Cream Sandwich is by far considered the best Android version, which provides beautiful user interface and customizable small tools though Gingerbread has the largest market share.

Google Wallet

One new product that Google came up with was Google Wallet.

According to Google, Google Wallet is a smart, virtual wallet that stores your payment cards, offers, and more on your phone and online. The Google Wallet mobile app makes your phone your wallet. It securely stores your credit cards and offers on your phone. When you check out at stores that accept Google Wallet, you can pay and redeem offers quickly just by tapping your phone at the point of sale.

In its early stage, it is really hard to predict what lies in store for Google Wallet but with the advancement in the technology these days it might be the future of making transactions.

Go Green with Google

Google continued to conserve the environment with its Google green plan. Google invested to create data centers that consumed half the energy than a typical data center consumed using renewable energy sources wherever possible.

In the year Google invested $94 million in four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects built by Recurrent Energy. With this, the clean energy investment by Google reached $915 million.

Google revamp with Design and search

Google has always been the King in the search world. There hasn’t been much competition for Google in the search engine domain. However, Google came up with slight tweaks to enhance searching for its user.

The homepage first got a slight makeover with a smaller logo and links moved to the top and bottom edges of the browser for a cleaner look. To enhance the search results, a major change to the ranking algorithm, known as Panda, was made. The change affected almost 12% of all queries. The change had a direct effect on content farms, stopping them from ranking high in Google’s search results.

Makeover time for Gmail and Youtube

Along with Google search Engine, Gmail and Youtube also got their makeover in July. The Gmail redesign was intended to make the look cleaner and sleeker with an option to choose among a few options. More changes came in December, as Google aimed to integrate Google+ with Gmail. With these changes, users are now able to see their contacts’ latest Google+ updates in Gmail, and can also see which circles they’ve added their contacts to.

The YouTube redesign was intended to better subscription management, better video recommendations, and of course more direct integration with Google+.

As usual both the makeovers got mixed reviews with many people not satisfied with the redesign.

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