I just noticed a trend. Google is a super big company and is buying everything in sight. I actually enjoy using google as my primary search engine. I am just amazed at how much it is buying. It is becoming like a super monopoly. I hope it is a good thing. I think over time we will be better able to judge its purchases and its effects on its users.

Today they came out with their earnings which was absolutely amazing. They made over a billion dollars in 3 months. Google is the most successful internet company.

Overcoming a traditionally slow season for Web surfing, Google said Thursday that it earned $1.07 billion, or $3.38 per share, for the three months ended in September. That was a 46 percent improvement from net income of $733.4 million, or $2.36 per share, at the same time last year.

When I was surfing the news, I found out Google just bought out another company called Jaiku. I know old news, that was so last week. But it seems like they just bought another company. Remember that game Monopoly where you try to buy everything and charge rent for it. The goal is to try to bankrupt everyone and own everything to win the game. Anyways, that’s what this reminds me of.

Even though google is a public stock and has investors, it really is controlled by the 2 founders because it never sold more than 50% stake of the company stock. A few years back, microsoft was accused of having a monopoly because it sold windows to vendors with a bunch of applications that automatically installed together. You know internet explorer, word, excel, outlook, and a bunch of stuff.

I googled to find out what google owned. This is what I know they have acquired in the past:

In August 2006, it acquired Neven Vision, an online photo-search company. On October 10, 2006, it acquired the online video company, YouTube. In October 2006, it also acquired JotSpot. JotSpot applications are delivered as Web-based services. In March 2007, the Company acquired Adscape Media Inc., a company that makes technology to deliver advertising over the Internet for placement within videogames.

July 09, 2007
Google to Acquire Postini*

April 13, 2007
Google to Acquire DoubleClick*

I thinks there was one time when another juggernaut company didn’t like what google was doing. Ebay used google to buy ads to generate traffic for them. Google created a similar service called google checkout that competed with Ebay’s paypal service. Ebay pulled all its ad one day and google backed down. Techcrunch gives a good quick summary of this event earlier this year “Ebay stares down Google and wins”.

Another article from the Times Online gives a more detailed story:

eBay’s decision to pull its advertising with Google came after it learnt of the search giant’s plan to gatecrash its user conference in Boston this week to promote CheckOut, a rival to eBay’s PayPal payment service.

Google later cancelled the party following eBay’s advertising moratorium.

These aggressive sales tactics have helped to cultivate the image of Google as a corporate bully with big brother tendencies.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google one day bought out eBay. I really hope they believe in their informal motto: “Don’t be evil”. I am considering buying some google stock. Do you think $640 a share is cheap or expensive??

I found another article from the NY Times about google in China called:
Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem) which deals with censorship. The article is long but a great read and fascinating to see how a company as big as google with all the money it is making that it seemed willing to compromise its own set of company core values and possibly integrity just to get every dollar on the virtual table.