Google Inc, the company behind the world's most successful internet search engine, will set up a European hub in Dublin and create more than 200 jobs over the next three years.
The firm, which is based in Silicon Valley, plans to establish an operations centre that will host hundreds of internet servers to power the eponymous global search engine.
Google will create jobs for marketing, finance, technical and customer support personnel at the centre, which will be connected into Global Crossing's telecoms network hub based in Citywest.
Search engines help internet users find websites by constructing huge indexes using key words to locate websites. Google's pre-eminence is attributed to a breakthrough technology that evaluates the web's link structure to determine most relevant results for user queries.
IDA Ireland said Google's decision to locate in Dublin was crucially important to the Government's strategy of establishing the Republic as a major European digital media and internet hub.
"This announcement is the same for us as the days when we won investment from Microsoft, Intel and Wyeth. Google is the flagship internet brand and will bring in further investment to the sector," said an IDA spokesman.
Google's Dublin facility is expected to manage all the internet searches performed by users outside the North American market.
It will use an existing data centre, probably a data centre formerly owned by Worldport which is based in Blanchardstown, to process all the searches using internet servers.
The scale of the investment by Google was not released by either the firm or the IDA yesterday but it is expected to run into millions of euro. The project will be supported by grant aid.
Google, which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, currently performs half of all the searches conducted on the internet. It has been so successful that it was named "brand of the year" in January, ahead of major global names such as Coca Cola, General Electric and Vodafone.
The genesis of the firm mirrors many start-ups in the internet sector when the founders, Stanford University graduates Mr Larry Page and Mr Sergey Brin, set up a firm in a university dorm before moving to an office attached to a garage in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.
The founders developed the Google engine with an unique ability to analyse the "back links" pointing to a given website. This gave its engine an ability to perform accurate searches at very quick speeds.
Its website at www.google.com currently performs 200 million sites per day and has signed partnerships with internet portals, Yahoo and Netscape.
Unlike many of the dotcom firms which burst on the scene in the late 1990s Google has flourished despite the downturn in the industry.
Although it is a private company and therefore does not disclose financial data, most analysts believe Google is profitable.
Google currently employs about 500 staff, with the vast majority of these based in the US.
The Tánaiste, Ms Harney, welcomed the announcement. She said the investment made by the State in global connectivity and infrastructure would provide Google and other firms with the environment they need to grow.
ICT Ireland, a lobby group for the technology industry, said yesterday the announcement confirmed that the Republic remained a favourable location for foreign direct investment.
"In the past few weeks we have had major job announcements from Xilinx and IBM, and when taken in conjunction with Intel's decision to build its Fab 24 site in Leixlip it is clear that many of the major global players in the information communications technology industry are extending their investments in Ireland," said Mr Brendan Butler of ICT Ireland.
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