Google Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity is our Business
Everybody’s searching for something different. Just as the very idea of Google depends on diversity, so does delivering the best possible products. Our success hinges on our ability to understand the needs of all 597 million of our users. That’s why we work hard to attract and hire talented individuals of every possible perspective, from all over the world. No matter how you slice it, diversity is our DNA.
Featured Project: The 40 Language Initiative
Google is a global company with international users accounting for more than half of our total user base. In order to meet the needs of our ever-growing user population, we need a broad diversity of perspectives and voices in the creation of our products. English-speaking users comprise only 30% of the total internet population. For Google to be competitive internationally, our products need to speak all the languages our users speak. With that in mind, we started the 40 Languages Initiative in May 2007, with the aim of getting Google products into 40 languages, mapping to roughly 70 countries. This initiative will enable more than 99.3% of the Internet population to use Google's products.
"Diversity and inclusion are fundamental to Google's way of doing things. We strive to be a local company in every country in which we operate, and we understand that our users have different cultures, languages, and traditions. It drives the projects we work on, the people we hire, and the goals we set ourselves. We go to great lengths to create products that are useful to our users wherever they are, and we've found that this commitment to diversity and to our users has been key to our success."- Nikesh Arora, President, EMEA Operations
Featured Group: The Guguelitos
According to the most recent eMarketer report, "Hispanics Online," there are currently 23 million Hispanics online, which is about 52% of the US Hispanic population. By 2012, more than 29 million will be online, increasing Internet penetration to 58.6%. To target this massive and growing market with AdSense and AdWords, our employees in Online Sales and Operations launched an organized group to coordinate separate efforts throughout the organization.
This group, the Guguelitos, works to make Hispanics more aware of Google, to make advertisers more aware of the growing opportunities in the Hispanic market, and to attract investment in this area in order to grow the market. The Guguelitos also promote internal and external education designed to target the Hispanic market with Google advertising solutions. Thanks to the work of our Guguelitos, we are seeing deeper penetration of our AdSense and AdWords services in the Hispanic market and have many cases that show how this work is improving our bottom line.
Buenamusica.com is one such example. In just three years, Manuel Treto's Buenamusica.com has become quite a successful enterprise. A US-based Spanish-language site dedicated to everything associated with music, Buenamusica.com now receives around 100,000 unique visitors per day from users worldwide.
When Manuel first started, he knew he needed an ad network that would deliver both English and Spanish ads relevant to his US Hispanic and Latin American visitors -- a one-stop shop with domestic and international inventory. "This was one of our biggest hurdles for monetizing the website," Manuel says. "Several of the networks I tried billed themselves as 'Hispanic networks', but after testing fifteen different ad networks on our site, we were happiest with AdSense. AdSense is better for Hispanic publishers because it usually outperforms all other ad networks by at least 50 percent in earnings, even those ad networks that are specifically targeted toward Hispanic sites."
Manuel wanted a flexible product that his five-person staff could easily modify. "The product's flexibility in terms of customization options is its most impressive feature," says Manuel. "What has worked the best for me is incorporating colors that are already associated with the site. We try to customize everything so that it matches the look and feel of the site, and users have commented on how nicely the ads fit into the page." Manuel now employs AdSense ads on 100 percent of his pages. He also offers his users the ability to navigate through his site with the Google Custom Search Engine, which he has linked to his AdSense account. This has allowed him to monetize his search results and to generate additional revenue for the site. "The more exposure you give to Google, the more money you are going to make -- and every little bit adds up. I strongly recommend using other Google products. Using the Custom Search Engine feature is bringing a little bit of Google technology to your website, and you can't beat that."