As Google celebrates its tenth birthday tomorrow, rivals searching for any flaws will be pleased to note that despite the web giant’s dominance, not everything that it touches turns to gold.

Take Orkut, for example. Orkut, a social networking site that Google launched in 2004, has not achieved notable success. Few people in the UK – or anywhere else other than Brazil, where it is big – have heard of it.

Another turkey in the making is Google’s Knol site. It went live about a month ago and is meant to be a Wikipedia-like repository of the world’s knowledge written by experts. Knol shows every sign of bombing, and not only because of its terrible brand name. Harry McCracken, founder and editor of the website Technologizer, which reports on internet developments, ran a test run of topics and reported that many of the entries were woeful, out-of-date and sometimes very similar to those in Wikipedia.

Google would say, with some justification, that it is still early days for Knol. Not that the company is worried. This is just another plank in its stated corporate mission: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

That mantra means a lot to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. And for good reason – it has made them billionaires and transformed Google into one of the most powerful corporations in the world.

Inventing the most efficient way of searching pages on the internet and then linking that to online advertising is arguably the greatest commercial feat since the invention of the motor car. Today, Google has 60 per cent of worldwide internet searches and 86 per cent of total UK searches. The company has a market value of $140 billion (£80.3 billion).

This week Google took another big stride forward with the release of Chrome, its internet browser. Microsoft has dominated the market for years with Internet Explorer, which comes with the Windows operating system used by most computers. Internet Explorer is the key portal through which people experience the web. The company that controls that portal wields significant power to direct users on to its own products and services. That has always been at the root of complaints (from Google and others) about Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market.

At the launch of Chrome on Tuesday, Google said that it simply wanted the world to have a better browser that could handle the new generation of sophisticated computer applications.

But the truth is that Google wants to flatten the opposition – in this case, Microsoft. Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, came close to admitting as much when he said: “The browser wars of ten years ago were right: the browser matters.” But the new browser wars may end as simply a sideshow for the main event of the next ten years – the battle over internet advertising on mobile phones.

There are about 1.2 billion internet users but nearly 3 billion mobile phone users, many in parts of the world where desktops will not penetrate. If Google wins in this market then the world really will be at its feet. Mr Schmidt said recently: “We can make more in mobile than desktop eventually. The reason is because the mobile computer is more targeted. Think about it: you carry your phone everywhere; it knows all about you. We can do a very, very targeted ad over time. We will make more money from mobile advertising.”

Google makes about $20 billion a year from online advertising, so that is a big claim. It explains the next big Google venture that will be in the shops for Christmas: the Google phone, likely to be called the HTC Dream (the handset will be made by HTC).

Its significance, as with Chrome, goes beyond its specifications. Both will use open technology, so that any company can use the software free to develop their own products and applications. The potential for expansion into the mobile market is clear and so is the breadth of Google’s ambition.

Google wants to have a hand in every part of technology so that its mission of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful” will be accomplished. And, of course, so that the company will make a lot more money.

Search team

1995 Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet as two PhD students at Stanford University, California
1996 Page and Brin begin work on a search engine called BackRub. They hypothesise that the best way to rank search results is to analyse the relationship between websites and then rank results according to the number of times the search term appears on a page
1998 Unable to gain interest for their search idea, by now called Google, they go it alone and look for investors. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, writes a cheque to “Google Inc” for $100,000. They ultimately find other investment worth $1 million. Google Inc opens its first office in a garage in Menlo Park, California, in September. Google answers 10,000 search queries a day
Feb 1999 Google moves to Palo Alto and has more than more than 500,000 queries a day. New funding is confirmed, including $25 million from two venture capital firms
Late 1999 Moves to the “Googleplex” in Mountain View, California. AOL/Netscape select Google as its web search service, helping to push traffic past three million searches a day
2000 Google becomes the world’s largest search engine, introducing a billion-page index. By the end of the year it receives 100 million search queries a day
2004 Google’s initial public offering takes place, raising $1.67 billion and making the company worth $23 billion. The site can search six billion web items
2006 Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion
2007 Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion
2008 Launches Google Chrome in beta version

Source: Google.com, Times database

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