Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of December 2009, 51.09% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 20.02% and United States with 17.28%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

As of June 2010, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 63rd in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. Anyone of age above 13 years can join orkut.

Buzz enables users to choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a group of friends each time they post. Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca and Twitter are currently integrated. The creation of Buzz was seen by industry analysts as an attempt by Google to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.Buzz also includes several interface and interaction elements from other Google products (e.g. Google Reader) such as the ability to “like” a post.

Google executive Sergey Brin said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure, but the service and its rollout have been strongly criticized for taking insufficient account of privacy concerns.

In July 2008 Hyves announced that they had reached 7 million users, about 5 million of which were Dutch. This amounts to about a third of the entire population of The Netherlands. In 2007, the website was voted “most popular website of the year” in the “Website of the year” competition.^[2] In 2006 and 2007 Hyves also won another “Website of the year” competition in the category for blogs and communities.

Because of the popularity among young people, even politicians (among them Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende) have their own Hyve. They see this as an opportunity to come closer to the people of a younger generation. As a result of the immense growth of users, the site is regularly subjected to performance problems since the 3 million users barrier has broken. This results in incorrect working links and the slow loading of pages.

According to a study of WatchMouse published on the 11th of January 2008, Hyves now ranks among the faster social networking sites. At that time the site had over 5.5 million registered users. As of August 2009, Hyves has over 9 million registered users.

A lot of well-known Dutch people have a profile on Hyves like some politicians and singers, to promote themselves.

Beyond the original word-search capability, Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquakes, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, sports scores, etc. There are special features for numbers: prices; money/unit conversions (“10.5 cm in inches”); calculations ( 3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2 ); package tracking; patents; areas codes; plus rudimentary language translation of displayed pages.

A Google search-results page is ordered by a priority rank called “PageRank” which is kept secret to avoid spammers from forcing their pages to the top. Google Search provides many options for customized search, such as: exclusion (“-xx”), inclusion (“+xx”), alternatives (“xx OR yy”), and wildcard matching (“*”).

From the Website

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

When you visit www.google.com or one of the dozens of other Google domains, you’ll be able to find information in many different languages; check stock quotes, maps, and news headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search billions of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages — more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.

What’s a Google?

“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. Google’s play on the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Other Information

• Type :  Public
• Founded : Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)
• Founder(s) : Sergey M. Brin, Lawrence E. Page,
• Headquarters : Googleplex, Mountain View, California, United States
• Area served : Worldwide
• Key people : Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Ph.D. (Chairman) & (CEO) Sergey M. Brin (Technology President),  Lawrence E. Page (Products President)
• Industry : Internet, Computer software

Contact Information

• Google Inc.
  1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
  Mountain View, CA 94043
  Phone: +1 650-253-0000
  Fax: +1 650-253-0001