Michael Wong

Here are some interesting stats from an article on Google in The New York Times--Google's revenue will soar from less than $300 million in 2002 to $750 million or more this year, with gross profit margins of 30 percent, according to a Google executive and several people who have knowledge of the company's financial situation. Last May, Ge'Lena Vavra, an importer of Italian suits in Las Vegas, decided to pay from 21 cents to $1.50 each time her ad for discount Italian suits was clicked after a search for words like "Armani" or "Hugo Boss." Before Ms. Vavra advertised with Google, she was selling about 10 suits a month over eBay. Then she bought 50 Google keyword ads using her Visa card. The next morning, she said, sales took off. She now sells almost 120 suits a month. She expects to spend $60,000 this year on Google search ads. "Our business exploded from Google, and Google alone," she said. [More proof that Google's AdWords ads work] Google now employs 800 people, yet it handles 200 million searches of the Web each day, a staggering one-third of the estimated daily total. [My estimate was 350 million - the author's estimate is 600 million per day!] To keep up with that torrent, Google has essentially built a home-brew supercomputer that is distributed across eight data centers. Several people with knowledge of the system said it consists of more than 54,000 servers [It was 10,000 the last report I read] designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks, these people said, making it what many consider the largest computing system in the world. [Full story: In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches - The New York Times]

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