Other services
Google Video and YouTube
Google’s expansion, fueled largely by keyword-based Web advertising, provided it with a sound footing to compete for dominance in new Web services. One of these was the delivery of video content. In January 2005 Google launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close-captioned text from television broadcasts. A few months later Google began accepting user-submitted videos, with submitters setting the prices for others to download and view the videos. In January 2006 Google Video Store opened, featuring premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS Corporation (television shows) and Sony Corporation (movies). In June 2006 Google began offering premium content for free but with ads.
For all of its marketing advantages, however, Google was unable to overtake the upstart leader in online videos, YouTube. Following its introduction in 2005, YouTube quickly became the favourite site for users to upload small video files, some of which attracted millions of viewers. Unable to generate anything close to the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. Rather than merge the Web sites, however, Google continued YouTube’s operation as a separate entity. In 2012 Google shut down Google Video and moved videos from there to YouTube. That same year, despite estimated revenues of more than $1 billion, Google said that YouTube remained an “investment” and has not said whether the division was profitable.
Gmail
In 2004 Google began offering a free Web-based e-mail account to select “beta” testers (a beta product being a product not yet in its final form). The service, known as Gmail, was opened to the general public in 2007 while still officially in its beta stage. One of the main appeals of Gmail was that it gave users an e-mail address that was independent of any particular Internet service provider (ISP), thus making it easier to maintain a permanent address. In addition, the service offered an unprecedented one gigabyte (one billion bytes) of free e-mail storage space, though users were also presented with advertisements based on keywords that the Google search engine found in their messages. Google later expanded the amount of free storage space given to users to seven gigabytes and allowed users to rent additional space. In 2007 the company acquired Postini, an e-mail services firm, for $625 million in order to improve Gmail’s security, especially in Google’s efforts to sign up businesses. In 2009 Google removed the beta status of Gmail, increasing its appeal to business users.
In January 2010 Google announced that it had detected a series of sophisticated hacking attacks, originating in China, that were directed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China. In some cases the accounts had been reconfigured to forward all incoming and outgoing e-mail to unfamiliar addresses. Google’s immediate response was to change Gmail’s protocol from the Web standard HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS, which increased security at the expense of speed. The attacks also led Google to threaten to reverse its stance, which allowed the Chinese government to censor its Google.cn site and allow Chinese users to receive unfiltered search results. This brought the company into conflict with the Chinese government and raised the possibility of Google’s exiting the Chinese market altogether. In March, Google avoided direct conflict by automatically redirecting Chinese users of Google.cn to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk. This arrangement continued until Google’s government-issued license to operate in China came up for annual renewal at the end of June. At that time Google changed Google.cn so that users could either use the censored Chinese site for services such as music search or manually click on a link to Google.com.hk for Web search. This move conciliated the Chinese government, which renewed Google’s license in July 2010.
Google Books
Before Google was even launched as a company, its founders had worked on digital book projects at Stanford and had always envisioned the day when Internet users would be able to search content in books. In 2004 the company announced Google Print, a project with several major libraries around the world that would begin to make their holdings freely available on the Internet. The company began by scanning public-domain books from the libraries’ collections, using sophisticated equipment. The digital files were then converted into portable document files (PDFs) that were fully searchable, downloadable, and printable. Works still in copyright appeared only in fragmented “snippet” form. In 2005 the company changed the name of the project to Google Books, and about one million books per year were scanned in its initial years of operation. As of 2012, Google had scanned more than 15 million books.
Meanwhile, groups of authors and publishers filed suit to stop the company from making passages from their copyrighted books available over the Internet. In 2008 Google reached a legal settlement in which the company agreed to pay the groups $125 million for past transgressions, though users could continue to read for free up to 20 percent of each work scanned by Google. In exchange for allowing parts of their works to be read online, the authors and publishers would receive 63 percent of all advertising revenue generated by page views of their material on Google’s Web site.