MBA Tutorials

Google SWOT Analysis

Strengths

•    It has established a brand name for itself and is considered to be the number one search engine on the web.
•    The speed and simplicity of its search engine is quite reliable and user friendly.
•    It has a ‘market cap’ of $185.61 billion according to ‘Yahoo Finance’, Dec 5, 2009.
•    It has a ‘war chest’ of $22 billion according to Adam Ostrow, Oct 15, 2009.
•    It is considered to be among the top 10 brands in the U.S.
•    It gets reputation by its popularity which proceeds by its word of mouth publicity, so it doesn’t need to put much effort in marketing its search engine.
•    It offers many products and services i-e; Desktop products, Mobile products, Web products, Hardware products.
•    It has a low operation cost regarding its products and services.
•    It has hired PhDs specially to work for enhancing the search engine algorithms which will render the search faster, relevant and more efficient.
•    It provides its search engine interface to 88 languages which is quite helpful for the locals of the countries.
•    It uses state-of-the-art technology to catalog the pages to give the most updated outcomes to its users.
•    It ranks the webpages with its Page-Rank technology that gives the users access to the important pages first.
•    It specializes in marking the results in differential scale i-e it separates the sponsored links from the regular links that are provided.
•    The search engine also provides localized searching where the users get results according to their regions.
•    It provides services such as Groups, Email, News, Directory etc.
•    It has come-up with ideas regarding solutions to wireless hand-held devices, personalized toolbars, and indexes.
•    It directly routes its users to the webpage without lingering on another site for ad. Revenue.
•    It has also acquired YouTube which provides video services to users across the web, and which is regarded to be the number-one online video portal users.
•    It has AdWords and AdSense programs working as the main mechanism.
•    It has a strong professional networking space present.

Weaknesses

•    It is dependent mostly on its search based advertising.
•    There is the risk of facing dead ends for the users, who find the citation but not the whole text.
•    It has lack of focus regarding the service of search engine.
•    Spammers usually take advantage of google’s ranking technology by creating sites that contain a lot of links by which they end up getting higher ranks.
•    Its link-based ranking tech. mostly didn’t work on actual traffic analysis.
•    Its cost-per-click advertising charge & ranking policy makes it difficult for the clients to predict the positioning of their ads and their costing as per se.
•    Its contextual advertising is considered less effective regarding sales generation, and the algorithms behind the search are erroneous.
•    Its localized search also results in errors at times.
•    It is the top player regarding the search engines yet it answers search queries with 50 to 60% accuracy.
•    Its inability regarding YouTube to be monetized.
•    It has weak presence regarding the social-networking space.
•    The products and services integration is quite heterogeneous.
•    It does not hold any strategy for contraction.
•    The cost for the data-center getting higher and higher.

Opportunities

•    It has vast opportunities for reaching new groups/segments and reaching for new contents.
•    Easy expert search, which can be integrated using open-url.
•    Using higher value content on the web.
•    It can relive the trend like Yahoo! and MSN and become a mass market portal for users that will increase switching costs for its potential users.
•    It can add localized vendors paid advertisements on the localized search.
•    It can merge with an already existing mass market portal to cover more ground regarding its users.
•    It can provide more services to the hand-held devices to capture more market that goes past the conventional internet.
•    It can increase its overall ad spending online.
•    Its can enhance by having new acquisitions.
•    It can increase the internet usage which will render the usage of google.com to be increased as well.

Threats

•    It can lose control over the indexing policy.
•    The censorship will be imposed which will render many services to be less effective.
•    Library services becoming less visible.
•    Users ending up not getting to the institutional subscription.
•    The disappearance of informational skills.
•    Competition from firms like Yahoo, MSN.
•    Legal trials.
•    Federal lawsuit regarding the collection of search habits of the consumers, which erodes public perception.
•    It will lose a considerable amount of revenue if its contacts with portals like AOL.
•    There is no time constraint regarding the business, competitors can emerge with better interface and new ideas regarding the search mechanism that will make Google lose its market share.
•    Its confusing cost-per-click policy can disappoint the clients and the firm may start losing them.
•    It can lose its simple and user-friendly interface if it decides to become a portal, for which it is favorite among its users.
•    It can get stuck in issues if it decides to acquire information regarding its users’ personal information.
•    Merging with another already establish mass market portal will be a good step, but Google will start losing its well-earned brand-name.
•    Its service relies highly on its network members.
•    Privacy issues regarding the content ownership.