Google is a private company and is notoriously closed-mouth about its revenue sources. We know that some of the money comes from partnership deals, and that some of it comes from Google "appliances" for searching private networks, but it's rare to actually get information on what actual customers pay for the service and why Google's pitch is attractive. The city of San Diego recently dropped $23,000 on a Googlebox that has completely changed the way that city employees and residents interact with each other. The interesting thing for me is that the competition here proposed a much more expensive "solution" that involved creating an explicit taxonomy and then manually tagging all the city's docs within it. In other words, the competition's pitch is, "First, tell us everything you have, then we'll tell you what you've got." No wonder Google's kicking ass in the market.
Bill Cull, the city's E-government program manager, says that because city officials were so familiar with Google, it was hard to ignore the vendor's pitch. It also didn't hurt that it was being offered a special price as a public entity. The city opted for a single Google server with a license to search an index of up to 150,000 documents. The result has been a welcome improvement for the city's 8,000 computer-equipped employees and its nearly 250,000 unique monthly site visitors: Cull says employees are using stuff they didn't know existed, and citizens are sending E-mail about the search success they're having.
(via EvHead)
