Google's SWOT Analysis

Strengths:

The basic look and feel of Google search engine which every single user can access and gain useful information is the main strength of Google. The speed of the search engine is fantastic and can gain any information within seconds. Google has the provision to integrate with various languages and its localized searching is added features compared to other search engines. Google’s products are its major strength which has created a huge user base. This has enhanced the trust to its customers and shareholders. Furthermore, the development work going on at Google supports innovation thereby always keeping the company in a moving state.

Weaknesses:

Even Google has acknowledged that its becoming really difficult to differentiate between real good content, good content and average content as a search engine can’t check for credibility of all the information. There are a lot of search engine strategies coming up. Even if a businessman is credible, his counterpart who might be more knowledgeable about Google’s system might receive more business. Google is just a search engine and it maintains its information in a organized manner and provide it to the user. Many products of Google like Google maps, finance, news, book search, picnic etc are not known to all the users.

Opportunities:

With emerging trends of technology and increase in internet users, a revolution has been created in the 21st century for the common man to quest for information and knowledge.”Adwords” which is pay per click program offered by Google and “Adsense” a program in which the website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site are major revenue generation programs and customer attraction programs respectively. Google’s major revenue comes from advertising 99.9% of its revenue is gained from ads. Google is constantly involved in acquisition programs like acquiring YouTube, Android, Picasa which comes to nearly 90 companies in its list. More importantly, Google has such a huge user base that any additions it adds, it immediately becomes more popular than even the original idea.

Threats:

It faces competition from other search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc. Baidu and Yandex in China and Russia are the market winners in that environment. These can also be emerging threats to Google. Changing user preferences has resulted in expectation of more quality results, which Yahoo focuses as its major agenda. Google is more than 10 yrs old. In this area Google might fail or take time to migrate its existing technology which is a serious threat. Most important is that Google does not lose its focus with competitors like Facebook and Yahoo. With its search engine, it has a tremendous sustainable advantage on the internet and moving away from that would be the biggest threat Google can face.