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.

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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.[linkunit]

• Spammers usually take advantage of google’s ranking technology bycreating 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.