Google Annual Report 2008 is out

Google probably is a company that makes life easy for us. To put it in Google's own words, their mission is to

"organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We believe that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. We have found that offering a high-quality user experience leads to increased traffic and strong word-of-mouth promotion.

(Source: Form 10-K of Google Inc)

Note: if you are wondering what is Form 10-k click here

Who will not be interested in reading the annual report of such a company for the year 2008?


Here are some interesting things from the report



"In 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world"

"In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day"

"we expanded Image Search to include the LIFE Magazine photo archive. This is a collection of 10 million photos, more than 95 percent of which have never been seen before, and includes historical pictures such as the Skylab space station orbiting above Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon"

"our first major purchase when we started Google was an array of disk drives that we spent a good fraction of our life savings on and took several car trips to carry. Today, I walked out of a store with a small box in my hand that stores more than all those drives and cost about $100"

"Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full-length movies every week"

"Today, some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds"

"Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1,640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts:"

At December 31, 2008, we had 20,222 employees, consisting of 7,254 in research and development, 8,002
in sales and marketing, 3,109 in general and administrative and 1,857 in operations. All of Google’s employees are
also equityholders, with significant collective employee ownership"

Well, If you are interested in, the report can be downloaded here. (1951KB/130 pages in pdf format)