Also called a "doorway page" or a "bridge page". A gateway page is a low quality web page that contains very little content and exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. This is done through spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine. Gateway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings.

Google was founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. At the time of the company's initial public offering in August 2004 $1.67 billion was raised, making Google worth $23 billion. 

Google's success should be attributed to its unique algorithmic ranking system PageRank ' a system that assigns a score to a web page based on the number of links to that page. 

Based in Mountain View, California the company now employs 13,748 people. The company has a relaxed corporate atmosphere that is illustrated in the companies philosophy "Don't be evil".

Central to Google's profitability is Google Adwords launched in 2000. Google Adwords are text-based contextual ads relevant to keyword searches. In 2006 the company earned $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues about 90 times the revenue from other Google ventures.

Google has acquired several start-up companies over the past few years including:  Pyra Labs creators of Blogger in 1999

Upstartle, creators of Writely in 2006.

Measure Map, a weblog statistics application in 2006.

YouTube for a huge $1.65 billion in stock in 2006.

JotSpot a developer of wiki technology in 2006.

DoubleClick purchased for $3.1 billion in 2007.

Postini an enterprise messaging security company in 2007.

Current Google applications include: Web search, Image Search, Google News,Google Product Search, Google Groups, Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, Google Video, Google Checkout and Google Earth

For more: Google Corporate History

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. 

But it can also be used to specifically track Adsense traffic ' therefore helping webmasters to optimize Adwords adverts based on where visitors come from, time on site, click path and geographic location. 

Modeled on Urchin's analytics tool, after Google purchased Urchin Software Group in 2005, Google Analytics was first rolled out in late 2005. The response was overwhelming and Google had to suspend sign ups only a few days later. After a short period using a lottery type of invitation system ' the tool made generally available in August 2006. 

Features Include: *Updates in less than one hour *Users can add up to 50 websites *Integration with Google Adwords *User friendly interface - Dashboard format

Google Bowling is a black hat SEO technique used to knock competitors down or out of search engine results. 

It is a form of SEO sabotage that is conducted by pointing hundreds of questionable links from low quality sites at a competitor's site so they end up banned or penalized by Google. 

Generally newer sites are more susceptible to Google Bowling as older sites are better established with a range of existing high quality links.

Google's online payment processing service, Google Checkout, was designed to simplify the online purchase/payment process. 

It works by allowing users to store their credit card and shipping details on their Google Account. Therefore minimizing the amount of information they need to input at the point of purchase. Purchases can be made at the click of a button. 

Features include:  * Fraud protection * The ability to track purchases * Easy transactions 

For more: www.googlecheckout.com

Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much 'Google Juice' and pages which link to highly 'juicy' pages acquire some reflected 'Google Juice'. 

Free software specifically selected by Google. There are no trial versions or spyware and it's ready to use in just a few clicks. 

Currently includes: - Google Earth - Spyware Doctor - Google Photos Screensaver - Star Office - Norton Security Scan - Google Desktop - Google Talk - Picasa - Adobe Reader - Firefox with Google Toolbar - Skype - Real Player