Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Google's Creators Battle Dangers of Success, 11/07/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/google_11-07.html

Initiating Questions:
1. What is Google?

2. How does Google make money?

3. Who are Google's competitors?

4. What does it mean to be an "underdog"?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. How does Google's stock price compare with its competitors?

Now, as Google trades for close to $385 a share on the stock market - compared to $27 for Microsoft and $38 for Yahoo! Inc.-- the company is in direct competition with some of the industry giants.

2. Who created Google? What was their motto?

Seven years ago, graduate school dropouts Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded the company Google with the motto, "Don't be evil," in the basement of a friend's garage.

3. How does Google's search compare with Yahoo?

Google accounts for 45.1 percent of all Internet searches; Yahoo is the nearest competitor with 23.3 percent of all searches, according to a September 2005 report from Nielsen/NetRatings.

4. List three products Google has released in the past few years

Froogle, a shopping search engine comparable to a worldwide flea market, and Google News, a service that gathers headlines and photos from over 4500 news sources, served as another outlet for Google's algorithmic technology in 2002.

In April 2004, the company launched GMail, a free Internet-based e-mail service that gave users a gigabyte of storage space -- 250 times the amount of space provided by Yahoo! Mail at the time.

5. What is Google Maps?

The following spring, Google reinvented the on-line mapping industry, posing a direct challenge to MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps.

Google Maps and Google Earth use satellite and digital imaging to coordinate local business searches and 3D maps. CNN used Google Earth recently to show the flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

6. Why was Google Print unpopular with authors and publishers?

Yet not all of Google's creations were met with high praise. In December 2004 Google announced Google Print, a partnership with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan.

Google Print hoped to scan the pages of all of the libraries' collections to create a digital card catalog that would be accessible to Google's 80 million daily users.

But critics said the plan violates the 1976 Copyright Act, which gives authors control over their "intellectual property".

Google claimed that since users would only be able to look at pages that come up in searches, and not browse through books, the project is covered under the "fair use" provision of Copyright Act.

7. Who is suing Google and why?

But the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers rejected the argument and are now suing Google to stop the project.

The president of the AAP, Pat Schroeder, told Newsweek, "The law does not say you can take my stuff because you're going to do something with it that is going to be really good for humanity."

8. What does Google want to do in San Francisco? Which companies does this threaten?

Google is now reaching beyond Internet search technology, proposing free wireless Internet to the city of San Francisco.

If successful, the wireless plan would provide a free public service and severely undercut telephone company SBC Communications and Comcast Corp, the local cable operator.

9. How is Google challenging Microsoft?

The company is also partnering with Sun MicroSystems to challenge Microsoft.

The two companies are working on a competing software package that would make money through advertising instead of costing consumers anything. Microsoft Office costs about $500.

10. What are some complaints against Google?

Technology workers in Silicon Valley complain that Google steals top engineers from other companies and has become too arrogant.

"Google is the new evil empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information," said Brian Lent, the president of a start-up in Seattle, who was friends with Brin and Page at Stanford, in the New York Times.

"I like and respect the Google guys, but let's just say that their ultimate aim seems to me to be, 'One Google under Google, for which it stands.'"

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think Google can stay good as it grows? What are the pressures on Google as its power and influence grows?

2. Do some research on Microsoft-it used to be a startup, underdog company-what happened?

3. Brian Lent, a former colleague of Brin and Page says "Google is the new evil empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information." What does that mean? Is it dangerous for one company to control how people find information on the Internet? Why or why not?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.