1.

History

Google Inc. is an American multinational corporation that provides Internet-related products and services, including internet search, cloud computing, software and advertising technologies. Advertising revenues from Ad Words generate almost all of the company's profits

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both attended Stanford University. Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake. Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system,[11] found on specialized netbooks called Chrome books. Google has increasingly become a hardware company with its partnerships with major electronics manufacturers on its high-end Nexus series of devices and its acquisition of Motorola Mobility in May 2012, as well as the construction of fibre-optic infrastructure in Kansas City as part of the Google Fibber broadband Internet service project Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centres around the world, and process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of usergenerated data every day. As of December 2012, Alexa listed the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website and numerous international Google sites as being in the top hundred, as well as several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Google also ranks number two in the Brands brand equity database. The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.[38] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domainsgoogle.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki[25]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million) In January of 2013, Google announced it had earned $50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time Google had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion

2. Financing and initial public offering

Google's first production server. Google's production servers continue to be built with inexpensive hardware. The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of US$100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was even incorporated. Early in 1999, while still graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much of their time from academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer, and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced,[48] with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidtagreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.

Some people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires. As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture. In 2005, however, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on: a flat organization with a collaborative environment. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.

The stock's performance after the IPO went well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. The company is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. 3

3. Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The next year, against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.

In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at five cents per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off created by Bill Gross

When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. During this time, Google was granted a patent describing its PageRank mechanism. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.

The complex has since come to be known as the Googolplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. The Googolplex interiors were designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects. Three years later, Google would buy the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

4. Acquisitions and partnerships

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003 Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, mainly focusing on small venture capital companies. In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole. The start-up company developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a three-dimensional view of the Earth. Google renamed the service to Google Earth in 2005. Two years later, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, giving Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. Later that same year, Google purchased Grand Central for $50 million. The site would later be changed over to Google Voice. On August 5, 2009, Google bought out its first public company, purchasing video software maker On2 Technologies for $106.5 million. Google also acquired Aardvark, a social network search engine, for $50 million, and commented on its internal blog, "Were looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it". In April 2010, Google announced it had acquired a hardware start up, Agni lux.

In addition to the many companies Google has purchased, the company has partnered with other organizations for everything from research to advertising. In 2005, Google partnered with NASA Ames Research Centre to build 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices. The offices would be used for research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October 2005 to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company also partnered with AOL of Time Warner, to enhance each other's video search services. Google's 2005 partnerships also included financing the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, along with other companies including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson. Google would later launch "AdSense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.[87] Increasing its advertising reach even further, Google and Fox Interactive Media of Corporation entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on (at the time) popular social networking site Myspace. In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing. In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 YouTube revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in 5

advertising sales. In 2007, Google began sponsoring NORAD Tracks Santa, a service that follows Santa Claus' progress on Christmas Eve, using Google Earth to "track Santa" in 3-D for the first time, and displacing former sponsorAOL. Google-owned YouTube gave NORAD Tracks Santa its own channel. In 2008, Google developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008. Google also announced in 2008 that it was hosting an archive of Life Magazine's photographs as part of its latest partnership. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the magazine. The photos were watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on all photos, regardless of public domain status.

In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, or enough to supply 55,000 homes. The farms, which were developed by Next Era Energy Resources, will reduce fossil fuel use in the region and return profits. Next Era Energy Resources sold Google a twenty percent stake in the project to get funding for its development. Also in 2010, Google purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway-based company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other related services. This acquisition will enable Google to add telephone-style services to its list of products. On May 27, 2010, Google announced it had also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob. This purchase occurred days after the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation into the purchase. Google acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.[101] In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of energy for 20 years. On April 4, 2011, The Globe and Mail reported that Google bid $900 million for six thousand Nortel Networks patents On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to-date when announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion subject to approval from regulators in the United States and Europe. In a post on Google's blog, Google Chief Executive and cofounder Larry Page revealed that Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is a strategic move to strengthen Google's patent portfolio. The company's Android operating system has come under fire in an industry-wide patent battle, as Apple and Microsoft have taken to court Android device makers such as HTC, Samsung and Motorola. The merger was completed on the May 22, 2012, after the approval of People's Republic of China.

This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies to help protect it in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies mainly Apple and Microsoft and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android After the acquisition closed, Google began to restructure the Motorola business to fit Google's strategy. On August 13, 2012, Google announced plans to layoff 4000 Motorola Mobility employees.

On December 10, 2012, Google sold the manufacturing operations of Motorola Mobility to Flextronics for $75 million. As a part of the agreement, Flextronics will manufacture undisclosed Android and other mobile devices On December 19, 2012, Google sold the Motorola Home business division of Motorola Mobility to Arris Group for $2.35 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction. As a part of this deal, Google acquired a 15.7% stake in Arris Group valued at $300Million.

On June 5, 2012, Google announced it acquired Quickoffice, a company widely known for their mobile productivity suite for both iOS and Android. Google plans to integrate Quickoffice's technology into its own product suite. On February 6, 2013, Google announced it has acquired Channel Intelligence for $125 million. Channel Intelligence, a technology company that helps customers buy products online, is active globally in 31 different countries and works with over 850 retailers. Google will use this technology to enhance it's ecommerce business.

Google Inc. currently owns and operates six data centers across the U.S., plus one in Finland and another in Belgium. On September 28, 2011, the company announced plans to build three data centers at a cost of more than $200 million in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and purchased the land for them. Google said they will be operational in one to two years.

5. Products and services

Advertising In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. Google has implemented various innovations in the online advertising market that helped make it one of the biggest brokers in the market. Using technology from the company DoubleClick, Google can determine user interests and target advertisements so they are relevant to their context and the user that is viewing them. Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google's Ad Words allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website, and earn money every time ads are clicked.

One of the disadvantages and criticisms of this program is Google's inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script "clicks" on advertisements without being interested in the product, which causes that advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid. Furthermore, there has been controversy over Google's "search within a search", where a secondary search box enables the user to find what they are looking for within a particular website. It was soon reported that when performing a search within a search for a specific company, advertisements from competing and rival companies often showed up along with those results, drawing users away from the site they were originally searching.

Another complaint against Google's advertising is its censorship of advertisers, though many cases concern compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For example, in February 2003, Google stopped showing the advertisements of Oceana, a non-profit organization protesting a major cruise ship's sewage treatment practices. Google cited its editorial policy at the time, stating "Google does not accept advertising if the ad or site advocates against other individuals, groups, or organizations." The policy was later changed. In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on its web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November 2008. In an attempt to advertise its own products, Google launched a website called Demo Slam, developed to demonstrate technology demos of Google Products. Each week, two teams compete at putting Google's technology into new contexts. Search Engine Journal said Demo Slam is "a place where creative and tech-savvy people can create videos to help the rest of the world understand all the newest and greatest technology out there.

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6. Google Goggles
is a downloadable image recognition application created by Google Inc. which can be currently found on the Mobile Apps page of Google Mobile. It is used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. For example, taking a picture of a famous landmark would search for information about it, or taking a picture of a product's barcode will search for information on the product. History Google Goggles was developed for use on Google's Android operating systems for mobile devices. While initially only available in a beta version for Android phones, Google announced its plans to enable the software to run on other platforms, notably iPhone and BlackBerry devices. Google has not discussed a non-handheld format. On 5 October 2010, Google announced availability of Google Goggles for iPhone and iPad devices running iOS 4.0. Uses Currently the system can identify various labels or landmarks, allowing users to learn about such items without needing a text-based search. The system can identify products barcodes or labels that allow users to search for similar products and prices, and save codes for future reference, similar to the failed Cue Cat of the late '90s, but with more functionality. Not in citation given] The system will also recognize printed text and use optical character recognition (OCR) to produce a text snippet, and in some cases even translate the snippet into another language. Current version As of August 2012, the current version of Google Goggles is 1.9 which adds several new features and improves both quality and ease of use. Goggles is specifically developed to run on mobile devices running the Android operating system and can be installed using Google Play (formerly Android Market). Although developed for Android there is now also an iPhone version, as part of the Google Search app, available from the iTunes Store or App Store. Goggles requires iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 on iOS 4.0 or higher to run. In January 2011, version 1.3 was released; it can solve Sudoku puzzles. Platform Google product manager Salish Nalawadi indicated that Google wants Goggles to be an application platform, much like Google Maps, not just a single product. They are currently working on developing an API for Goggles, once they determine what shape it should take. They are currently discussing API ideas with outside developers

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7. Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service provided by Google, created by Alexander Jamieson, and released on April 24, 2012, which enables user cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. Google Drive is now the home of Google Docs, a suite of productivity applications that offer collaborative editing on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Rumours about Google Drive began circulating as early as March 2006. Files shared publicly on Google Drive can be searched with engines like Open Drive (available as a Chrome app). Storage Google Drive gives all users 5 GB of cloud storage to start with. A user can get additional storage, which is shared between Picasa and Google Drive, from 25 GB up to 16 TB through a paid monthly subscription plan ($2.49 US per month for25 GB). Originally, these subscriptions were truly treated as "additional storage" such that a user with a 25 GB subscription would still retain the free 5 GB for a total of 30 GB; however, in September 2012, Google announced it was cutting the 5 GB of free storage from all paid users' accounts, so that a user paying for 25 GB would be restricted to precisely 25 GB. Data storage of files up to 1 GB total in size was introduced on 13 January 2010, but has since been increased to 10 GB. Documents using Google Docs native formats do not count towards this quota. Client For Google Drive to synchronize files on the user's computer in the cloud, the Google Drive client software must be running on the user's computer. The client will communicate with the Google Drive online, and ensure that files are synchronized in both locations. At launch, Google Drive client software was available for the following devices: on PCs running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, or Mac OS X Lion (10.7) and Snow Leopard (10.6); on Android smartphones and tablets with Eclair and newer Oases (Android 2.1+); on iPhones and iPads, iOS 5.0+. Work on Linux client software is underway. According to Sundar Pichai of Google, the Google Drive online storage service will be tightly integrated with Chrome OS version 20. There are third-party Google Drive application programs ("apps") that can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. These applications, running in Google Chrome, operate on the online files, and can be used to edit images and videos, fax and sign documents, manage projects, create flowcharts, etc. Ownership and licensing Google has only one, unified terms of service and privacy policy for all its products. According to CNET, unlike competing services Dropbox and SkyDrive, Google retains a broader claim to reproduce, use, and create derivative works from content stored on the Google Drive. This license is perpetual even after removal of content. Although the user 12

retains intellectual property rights, the broad Google Drive license allows extraction and parsing of uploaded content to customize advertising and other services that Google provides to the user, and for promoting the service. The broad nature of Google's claim to uploaded files also allows for usability improvements, such as creating modified versions of uploaded content which are more suitable for various use cases. For example, transcoding an uploaded video into multiple formats more suitable for viewing on a phone or different web browsers. Another report from The Verge finds that Google's terms are quite comparable to those of its competitors, and slightly better in some cases.

8. Google Docs
An example of a document in Google Docs Google Docs (now housed in Google Drive) is a free, Web-based office suite and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of Writely and Spreadsheets with a presentation program incorporating technology designed by Tonic Systems. This extension or replacement of Google Docs called Google Drive was opened to the public on April 24, 2012. History Writely's beta logo Google Docs originated from two separate products, Writely and Google Spreadsheets. Writely was a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005. Spreadsheets, launched as Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006, originated from the acquisition of the XL2Web product by 2Web Technologies. Writely's original features included a collaborative text editing suite andaccess controls. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialog boxes are similar to what users may expect in a desktop word processor such as Microsoft Word or Libreoffice Writer. On March 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired Upstartle. At the time of acquisition, Upstartle had four employees.Writely closed registration to its service until the move to Google servers was complete. In August 2006, Writely sent account invitations to everyone who had requested to be placed on a waiting list, and then became publicly available on August 23. Writely continued to maintain its own user system until September 19, 2006, when it was integrated with Google Accounts Meanwhile, Google developed Google Spreadsheets using the technology it had acquired from 2Web Technologies in 2005 and launched Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006 as the first public component of what would eventually become Google Docs. It was initially made available to only a limited number of users, on a first-come, first-served basis. The limited test was later replaced with a beta version available to all Google Account holders, around the same time as a press release was issued 13

In February 2007, Google Docs was made available to Google Apps users. In June 2007, Google changed the front page to include folders instead of labels, organized in a side bar. On September 17, 2007, Google released their presentation program product for Google Docs. On July 6, 2009, Google announced on their official blog that Google Docs along with other Google Apps would be taken out of beta On January 13, 2010, Google announced on their official blog that Google Docs would allow any file type, including 1 GB of free space and $0.25/GB for additional storage. On March 7, 2010, DocVerse, an online document collaboration company, was acquired by Google. It allows multiple user online collaboration on Microsoft Office compatible document formats such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Improvements based on DocVerse were announced and deployed in April 2010. In June 2010, it was reported that access to Google Docs had been blocked in Turkey. A Google employee confirmed the problem saying that it "appear[ed] to be linked to the ongoing ban on YouTube." As of September 29, 2011, Google Docs supports offline viewing through an opt-in beta HTML 5 web app. On April 26, 2012, Google Launched Google Drive, which supplants Google Docs. It combines all of the Docs features with improved storage functionality Features Google Docs is Google's "software as a service" office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user's local computer in a variety of formats (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, and Microsoft Office). Documents are automatically saved to Google's servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents.). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes. The service is officially supported on recent versions of the Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome browsers running on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, Linux, and Chrome operating systems. Google Docs is a tool for real time collaborative editing. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Users cannot be notified of changes, but the 14

application can notify users when a comment or discussion is made or replied to, facilitating collaboration. There is no way to highlight changes made by a particular editor in real time during a writing session, nor a way to jump to the changes made. However, users can usually see where in the document or file a particular editor is currently writing, since in most of the suite's products, an editor's current position is represented with an editor-specific color/cursor. Also, the revision history included in the service allows users to see the changes made to a document, distinguished by editor, using their specific color. The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument (for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). It also includes support for proprietary formats such as .doc and .xls. Google Docs is one of many cloud computing document-sharing services. The majority of document-sharing services require user fees, whereas Google Docs is free. Its popularity amongst businesses is growing due to enhanced sharing features and accessibility. In addition, Google Docs has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity among students and educational institutions. Google Cloud Connect is a plug-in for Windows Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 that can automatically store and synchronize any Microsoft Word document, Power Point presentation, or Excel spreadsheet to Google Docs in Google Docs or Microsoft Office formats. The Google Doc copy is automatically updated each time the Microsoft Office document is saved. Microsoft Office documents can be edited offline and synchronized later when online. Google Cloud Sync maintains previous Microsoft Office document versions and allows multiple users to collaborate by working on the same document at the same time. Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites also incorporate Google Apps Script to write code within documents in a similar way to VBA in Microsoft Office. The scripts can be activated either by user action or by a trigger in response to an event Google Forms and Google Drawings have been added to the Google Docs suite. Google Forms is a tool that allows you to collect information via personalized survey or quiz. The information is then collected and automatically connected to a spreadsheet with the same name. The spreadsheet is populated with the survey and quiz responses. Google Drawings allows users to collaborate creating, sharing, and editing images or drawings. Google Drawings contains a subset of the features in Google Presentation (Google Slides) but with different templates. Offline viewing is available as an opt-in beta HTML 5 web app. On May 15, 2012, Research tool was introduced in Google Docs. It brings the webs wealth of information to the users while they're writing documents.

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Storage Google Docs initially provided 1 GB of storage for free. On April 24, 2012, the free storage was increased to 5 GB. Other aspects of the service were changed at the same time, including: The price for increased storage amounts was increased, and was changed to monthly rather than yearly instalments. Purchased storage was originally shared between Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs services. Now it is shared between Picasa and Google Drive only. Free storage for Gmail increased from 7 GB to 10 GB, and is raised to 25 GB for accounts with upgraded storage. This storage limit is now separate from that of Google Drive and Picasa. Current monthly rates for increased storage are: $2.49 for 25 GB, $4.99 for 100 GB, and additional tiers up to 16 TB at roughly $0.05 per GB. Customers who purchased additional storage plans before April 24, 2012 are allowed to keep the old rates as long as they maintain service and do not change their plan. File limits Individual documents may not exceed 10 GB as of 7 March 2013, embedded images must not exceed 2 MB each, and spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 400,000 cells, and 200 sheets. In September 2009, an equation editor was added which allows rendering in Latex format. However, Google Docs lacks an equation numbering feature. Find-and-replace is available, and although there was no ability to do the search in a reverse direction in the original release, the newest version of Google Docs allows reverse search and reverse replace. Files uploaded, but not converted to Google Docs format, may be up to 10GB in size. Documents 1,024,000 characters, regardless of the number of pages or font size. Uploaded document files that are converted to the Google documents format cannot be larger than 2 MB. Spreadsheets

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400,000 cells, with a maximum of 256 columns per sheet. Uploaded spreadsheet files that are converted to the Google spreadsheets format cannot be larger than 20 MB, and need to be under 400,000 cells and 256 columns per sheet.

Supported file formats Google Drive viewer allows one to preview the following file formats Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP) Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV) Text files (.TXT) Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS) Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX) Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX) Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF) Apple Pages (.PAGES) Adobe Illustrator (.AI) Adobe Photoshop (.PSD) Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF) Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) PostScript (.EPS, .PS) Fonts (.TTF, .OTF) XML Paper Specification (.XPS) Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

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9. References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive http://www.google.co.in/about/company/history/ http://www.google.co.in/mobile/goggles/#text http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles

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