<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" 10. Making Software Free /// Google Apps  We used to pay for software. Of course, that was back when word processors were shipped on CDs and floppies. Today, robust Web-based programs gradually are setting software free, moving applications from permanent park on your hard drive to constant flux in the &amp;quot;cloud.&amp;quot; And Google, more than any other company, is in the forefront of this trend.  Microsoft may charge $100 or more for Office, but Google offers a compatible suite for free. In many ways, it&amp;#039;s better than the expensive version\u2014it automatically backs up your documents, emphasizes collaboration and sharing tools and allows you to access your files from any computer that&amp;#039;s online. And while Sprint, Verizon, AT&amp;amp;amp;T and T-Mobile may charge a few dollars to download applications (and terrible games) for your phone, Google offers all of its mobile apps\u2014online and off\u2014for nary a cent By popularizing the idea that software is something to be given away, either as a vessel for advertisements or some other revenue model, Google has changed people&amp;#039;s expectations about what they are entitled to receive without paying. And here&amp;#039;s hoping we&amp;#039;ll never go back. While Google certainly pumps its share of ads into its programs, it has done it with tact (no singing banners or pop-ups). So while the search giant certainly makes money\u2014$16 billion in revenue in 2007\u2014it&amp;#039;s very, very good at concealing who&amp;#039;s earning it for them\u2014us. 9. Taming Wild Search /// BackRub In the late 1990s, the only way for search engines (remember Lycos and AltaVista?) to find a Web page was to sift through endless lines of text for search terms. But this method had a serious shortcoming: It was terrible at relating a search term to its context. For example, old-school search had no way of telling the difference between a &amp;quot;rock&amp;quot; concert and a granite &amp;quot;rock.&amp;quot;  Then came BackRub, a predecessor to Google created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still grad students at Stanford. BackRub started as a means to track citations in academic articles, allowing professors to judge the impact of a particular publication on other publications\u2014all by measuring the number of citations, or links, leading both to a page and from a page.  Tracking these back-links was a fairly new idea, but an even larger breakthrough came when Page and Brin learned to translate these link statistics, via an algorithm, into the PageRank system. This is the relevance ranking of sites that we see in any Google query today. With PageRank, BackRub could work for the entire Web, and turn the formerly anarchic world of search into a tamed web of related links.  8. Giving Us the Globe /// Google Earth  As innovative as the schemes that come out of Google Labs are, many of their most interesting products actually came from other companies that Google has been smart enough to swallow up. Take Google Earth, which maps the entire world using 3D satellite imagery. It came about with the purchase of a little startup called Keyhole. Google wasn&amp;#039;t the first company interested in the small imaging firm. Sony, Nvidia and even the CIA provided venture capital to get this promising startup off the ground. And while Keyhole had a customer base that ranged from real estate companies to the Department of Defense, it was Google that bought the company and democratized the technology by creating a fun, satellite-delivered globe (Google Earth), and a very useful street map program. Of course, taking illicit satellite spy shots could be considered an act of war by some governments, so it should come as no surprise that Google has taken heat from multiple governments over just how much of the Earth they have made accessible to anybody with an Internet connection. As of February of this year, Google had one third of the world&amp;#039;s land surface imaged, and Google Earth had been downloaded 130 million times.  7. Capturing a Neighborhood /// Google Street View Mapping programs have always required a visual leap of faith. After all, nobody travels around town by flying above streets and looking down. By showing you how things look from street level, Google&amp;#039;s Street View is able to show you what places really look like, from a human perspective.  Google created Street View in 2007 by launching a fleet of at least 30 GPS-equipped Chevy Cobalts that were mounted with cameras capable of capturing 360-degree panoramic views (click here for a behind-the-scenes look).  Google quickly mapped five major U.S. cities from the ground level (San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and New York), and has added 53 more to its database since, as well other as locations such as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks and at least 41 international locations. As of August, gadget fanatics could make a pilgrimage to Tokyo&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;electric city&amp;quot; of Akihabara without booking a plane ticket. 6. Delivering E-Mail We Actually Like /// Gmail  Google did not invent e-mail. In fact, Google was shamefully late to the whole e-mail scene, trying to break into a market where people were already pretty satisfied, and married to an existing e-mail address. But Google&amp;#039;s Gmail, which launched in 2004, offered two important features that allowed us to look at e-mail just a bit differently. First, there was an unprecedented amount of free storage\u20141 GB in all. That was four times the space offered by Hotmail and Yahoo at the time. Today, the bucket has ballooned to 7 GB per account. That&amp;#039;s roughly the same storage capacity that Apple offers in some iPhones.  Also, Gmail organized e-mail differently. Instead of each e-mail coming and going autonomously like an enveloped letter, Gmail grouped these Tos and Froms into conversations, cutting down clutter and allowing you to see mail as threaded discussions. Just as Google revolutionized Web crawlers through tracking back-links and organizing the content into search results, Gmail&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;conversations&amp;quot; were just backtracked e-mail organized into easily sorted tabs. Oh, and it&amp;#039;s still got the best spam filter around. 5. Democratizing the Blogosphere /// AdSense If you were to start a shoe blog today and place a call to Nike asking if they&amp;#039;d be interested in placing advertisements on your site, chances are you&amp;#039;d be laughed off the phone. But by allowing almost anybody to embed keyword-based advertisements (which draw money on a pay-per-click basis), AdSense changed the Internet advertising game\u2014heck, the advertising industry in general.  The mammoth program opened up the doors (and revenue) of Internet advertising to everybody, allowing advertisers to target small sites they may not even know exist, and small sites to get a virtually-guaranteed source of cash. AdSense isn&amp;#039;t the way Google makes its piles of gold. Its real breadwinner is AdWords, which allows advertisers to buy a sponsored PageRank. But take a glance around at just how the average blog is paying the bills (or attempting to), and you&amp;#039;ll surely see an AdSense box. Or two. Or three. 4. Scanning the Universal Library /// Google Book Search  What does the world&amp;#039;s most powerful search franchise do when it&amp;#039;s bored with indexing Web pages? Simple: digitizes books and makes them searchable. On the surface, Google Book Search could be the company&amp;#039;s standard Web search with a different logo skinned on top. But the technical feat occurring behind the scenes is astounding.  In partnerships with famed literary institutions such as the Harvard University Library and the New York Public Library, Google scans 1000 pages per minute and over 3000 books per day to build a database of complete digital texts so large that even Google shies away from offering a solid number (ongoing lawsuits with publishers don&amp;#039;t help). But as of 2007, the company announced that it had digitized over a million books. Today, that number should easily have been doubled.  Though the literary compendium isn&amp;#039;t a favorite amongst publishers and authors who worry about copyright violations, there&amp;#039;s no question that Google has constructed the single largest digital library in the world. Even in the many instances in which the full text cannot be read online because of copyright restrictions, the information is still there on Google&amp;#039;s servers, lurking just beneath the surface.  3. Adapting the Genius // Google Labs and Beta With the extensive Google Labs and Beta programs, the company can release products that aren&amp;#039;t quite ready for prime time, then test them on a large scale while managing consumer expectations. Google, of course, has an advantage over peers such as Microsoft when creating new software. With a majority of its programs quarantined safely in the cloud, Google doesn&amp;#039;t need to worry about unintentionally crashing someone&amp;#039;s computer\u2014the worst-case scenario with, say, Google Apps, is more likely a page coming up blank. That&amp;#039;s why Google can be more vocal about its beta programs and recruit not only the most learned computer techie, but casual browsers who just want to kill some time on the Web.  Through Google Labs, the company is able to share technology, sometimes just to show off an otherwise noncommercial product and other times to test the waters and collect critical feedback from users. Many of Google&amp;#039;s key products, like Google Docs, Gmail and Google Maps, began with Labs testing before being rolled out officially. Sharing so many underdeveloped tools creates a mutually beneficial relationship for Google and the consumer who&amp;#039;s looking for the next big thing. 2. Taking the Power Back /// Server Farms  It&amp;#039;s believed that Google has set up the largest network of servers in the world. Of course, we can&amp;#039;t say this for sure, because nobody outside Google keeps a real count. And nobody (but Google employees) is allowed inside. Google owns roughly 65 data centers across the globe (with a new patent seeking to float them at sea), and they vary somewhat in size. By most estimates, Google holds a collection of servers numbering somewhere between 200,000 and 450,000. Based on searches through patents and on sparse interviews, it can be inferred that Google&amp;#039;s networking software is Linux-based and is coded in-house. All servers are hardware-modified to private, internal specifications. But these centers aren&amp;#039;t carbon copies of one another. That&amp;#039;s because as quickly as the technology market advances, Google updates its system for maximum efficiency. In other words, each data center is custom-built.  Of course, these servers use a massive amount of power. Various estimates put data-center power consumption between 50 and 100 megawatts per location. By comparison, 1 megawatt can power 800 homes. Despite these energy requirements, Google became a carbon-neutral company in late 2007. 1. Delivering the Virtual OS /// Chrome On the cusp of its 10th anniversary, Google unleashed its first Web Browser, seizing an opportunity to approach the Web at a completely new level of penetration and control.  Chrome is still new, but early reviews peg it as a speedy code-mongerer built specifically to handle the unique processing needs of data-heavy, Web-based applications (the sort that Google has become known for making.) As Web-based applications become more and more powerful, Chrome should carve out an important niche. If so, the expression &amp;quot;Google it&amp;quot; will become apt for doing just about anything on the Web for the next decade and beyond. Mark Wilson is an associate editor at Gizmodo, where he has written about everything from Google&amp;#039;s Chrome launch to his love-hate relationship with mini netbooks to, yes, flying a jet pack. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a3643/4281769/>