Online Media of the year: Search No. 1 Google

Category: Search site

Owned by: Google Inc.

Co-founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Chairman and CEO: Dr. Eric Schimdt 

Managing director Asia: Richard Kimber

Looking at Google's uninterrupted good showing in recent years, one would be hard-pressed not to comment that the search engine titan is simply unstoppable. Google's financial results for the first quarter of 2007 boasted revenues of US$3.66 billion (S$5.59 billion) for the quarter ended 31 March 2007, an increase of 63% compared to the first quarter of 2006. Although it remains to be seen whether Google's biggest acquisition to date - video phenomenon YouTube - was a wise move, it is clear that the search engine giant has no intentions of slowing down anytime soon. 

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with the mission of organising the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful to online users. To date, Google hosts 380 million global unique users per month.

Google's revenue is generated from advertising mainly via Google Adwords, which has been widely recognised to be able to provide advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost effective online advertising that is highly targeted as well as relevant to the content of any given page, allowing advertisers to select their own target keywords and to pay by number of clicks generated. Google's recent clients include Sony, Amazon.com, Cisco and Volvo, to name a few.

Judging by the results of the survey, Google has definitely earned a firm nod of approval from local marketers. Although slightly fewer respondents put in their votes for Google as compared to Yahoo on the overall (419 as compared to Yahoo's 451 votes), Google was consistently ranked by majority of respondents across all categories to be the 1^st search site they would choose to advertise on. Google was ranked 1^st at least two times more than it was ranked 2^nd for both agency and client-side respondents (104 agency-side respondents ranked Google 1^st place while 34 ranked it 2^nd place and 180 client-side respondents ranked Google 1^st place while 71 ranked it 2^nd place).

By job function, Google managed to pull in more votes against Yahoo most notably from CEOs, advertising creative persons, and public relations consultants on the agency-side, and CEOs from client-side. It was also notable that the public relations sector tended to favour Google more than Yahoo (21 votes against Yahoo's 19 votes). The same went for business services (28 votes against Yahoo's 24 votes) and property construction and utlities companies.

The survey also indicated that Google seemed to have slightly stronger support from companies of local origin (71% of respondents from companies of local origin ranked it 1^st) than from companies of foreign origin (63.4% of respondents from companies of foreign origin ranked it 1^st). This might just be a positive indication Google is looking for in its efforts to bring its operations closer to Singaporean and the Southeast Asian market, especially in light of the recent launch of its Singapore office.