The Almighty Google

Google are so big that, should the top 1000 sites leave Google's index, 1000 other sites will rise to take their places, and the original 1000 will see a massive drop in visits. I only know one person that doesn't use Google, and that's because he's 50-odd, and can't work out how to get to Google from his homepage - Yahoo!.

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Google's main source of revenue is ads, Skurai. As WW mentioned, they also dabble in SaaS - Google Docs work, are fantastic for collaboration between multiple sites, and are a lot cheaper than similar solutions from companies like Microsoft.

Google employees are paid a salary for working there, same as any other employees. People working at Google do... everything. The vast majority of employees are Software Engineers, who work on various Google products (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Android, Wave and, of course, the search engine), as well as their own project (Google gives everyone one day in five to work on their own projects. Gmail, Wave, Chrome, and various other services saw life as a personal project of a Google employee). The rest of the employees do everything else - finance and accounts, marketing, research, cooking, etc.

To work at Google you have to be enormously intelligent. I'd love to work there one day, but I'm not sure I'd fit the grade, sadly. Regardless of the position you're applying for, you'll be asked some very strange questions which give the interviewers an idea of how you think. For example (and I'll make a new thread with some of them):

* How many golf balls can you fit on a school bus?
* How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
* If you were shrunk down to the size of a nickel and thrown into an empty glass blender sixty seconds before the blades started spinning, what would you do?

The answers are: ~600,000, say about $10 a window, and whatever you want (the third question is there to see how your mind works).