Google is not only a reputable search engine, but it is the source where people get their information from online. There is a reason the term “google it” is a well-known phrase and everyone, young and old, use it on a daily basis.
Conception
It all began in 1996 when Larry Page, a Ph.D. candidate, began searching for a dissertation theme. Larry begun exploring the structure and properties of the then, World Wide Web. Eventually, he met Sergey Brin, a fellow Ph.D. student, and the two began a new-found passion and focused on a complex search engine that analyzed the relationships among websites. Their research project was nicknamed Backrub because of the backlinks used in the search engine. Together, Larry and Sergey developed the PageRank the first algorithm that was their secret ingredient to become the giant of the search world. Although it no longer is privy to the public, Google still uses components of it in their current algorithms.
While still running under Standford University’s website, the name of their search engine eventually changed to Google, coined from the word googol – a play on the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. In early fall of 1997, the domain name of Google was registered and the legacy had begun.
Google Incorporated
Google Inc. was officially born in summer of 1998 when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000. From that investment, they packed their computers up from their dorm rooms to a friend’s (Susan Wojcicki, now CEO of YouTube) garage.
With Google gaining attention among investors and Silicon Valley, they eventually landed money from other investors including Jeff Bezos, who is the Amazon.com founder, and many other major investors.
Google now has become the most visited site in the world.
Random facts about Google
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin met by chance when Sergey, a current Ph.D. candidate was assigned to show Larry, a prospective Ph.D. student, around Stanford’s campus.
- At the time, hard disks only came in 4 Gigabytes, and Larry and Sergey’s PageRank needed much more than that. So they assembled 10 of these drives into a “low-cost” cabinet made of Lego Blocks. It has been said the original lego structure is why Google’s logo is colorful and playful.
- The “Google Doodle” is a short-term modification of the traditional logo. You’ve seen the Google doodle to commemorate holidays, special events, and occasions. The original “Google Doodle” was an image of a stick figure that was meant to represent that Larry and Sergey were “out of office” at the Burning Man festival.
- When Google first went public in 2004, it was valued as much as General Motors, $27 billion.