The answer is web search giant Google Inc

The answer is web search giant Google Inc. In its 12 years of existence, the company has revolutionized the way the Internet is used. Nevertheless Google, whose mission is to organize the world's information, hopes to expand into every facet of our lives. The giant is about to get a whole lot bigger.

The company's growth has been spectacular

The company's growth has been spectacular. Today, Google is used by more than 70 per cent of everyone who searches the web. Its advertising revenue accounts for 40 per cent of all advertising dollars spent online. Since going public in 2004, its earnings and profits have climbed every year, and last year the company added 20 employees on average every week.

Even Google's robotic cars can be justified because if robots can pilot cars, drivers will be more at liberty to surf the web, looking up restaurants or making travel arrangements on the go. Keeping track of flu trends, which Google does by analyzing searches made by its users, fits into the company's stated mission to organize the world's information, says Goldman. Google's foray into producing electricity, the company says, is a way to power Google's servers that are used for cloud computing as part of the company's mission to be more self-sufficient.

The key to the company's success

Innovation has been the key to the company's success, as is its willingness to take bets on new products that don't have a clear revenue source. YouTube is a good example. Afterwards Google bought the video-sharing site in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the company had to endure lawsuits from television networks for copyright infringements and at that time four years of losses totalling around $500 million previously YouTube taking everything into account turned a profit last year.

"Very few companies would put up with all the lawsuits that YouTube was attracting," said Ken Auletta, a innovation journalist and the author of the book Googled: the End of the World as We Know It. "No one is going to contain Larry Page and Sergey Brin's belief that you got to try things."

Ian Lurie, president of the market innovation company Portent Interactive and longtime Google observer, said he believes the company has spread itself too thin. He said the Chrome operating system, which is supposed to be an alternative to Windows, is a bad idea.

The social network movement

"With the social network movement, people are however finding new ways to get information online that doesn't require Googling it," Goldman said. "Nevertheless, if you want to find a restaurant or a good book, you'll ask your friends on Facebook."

Marketers are but saying it's no longer just enough to advertise on Google. Facebook has as well become an important tool. Google allows advertisers to target those who key in certain search words; Facebook allows them to pinpoint a specific demographic, right down to the age, gender, income range, profession, and interests. During Facebook's earnings from advertising are for all that a fraction of what Google collects, the company is making inroads. Facebook as well offers advertisers the opportunity to reach out to their clients, not just through ads, nevertheless by interacting with them by creating Facebook pages with pictures, and videos, or by holding online contests, all of which cost very little to produce, yet could go viral in a short amount of time.

Auletta said another reason that Facebook, and nevertheless even Apple, with its focus on phone and iPad applications, are threats is that they create what are being called walled communities, much like AOL in the early days of the Internet, where people can find everything they need within the confines of Facebook, or through the applications they download. That in essence privatizes the web and makes a search engine like Google - whose goal is to make sense of the open web universe - less relevant.

"Google's biggest problem is that it has consistently failed to produce any new lines of business apart from keyword-related advertising, which on the whole produces over 90 per cent of its income," Ingram wrote. "It's true that Google is making money from display advertising, YouTube views, mobile, etc. However this is peanuts."

One bright spot on the horizon is Google's mobile operating system Android, which it purchased in 2005. Google has licensed the software for free to any cellular phone company to allow them to make a smartphone that can compete with the Apple iPhone. The results have been impressive. In less than two years since it was launched, Android surpassed Apple to become the second-best selling smartphone, afterwards sales surged 900 per cent last year. Android is as well the key operating system for numerous new tablets that have hit the market in recent months. The smartphone and tablet market are huge growth potentials for Google, as they're poised to become the dominant way people access the Internet. Though the company has given Android away for free, it takes a cut of the profits of those who develop applications for the operating system. Because it's free to use Google software to develop an application and free to list it on the Android market, phone application developers have flocked to Google, and it currently has 130,000 applications to Apple's 300,000.