GOOGLE HISTORY
(from the Official Documentation found on google.com)
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Google is a play on the word "googol",
which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician
Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed
by 100 zeros. A googol is a very large number. There isn't a
googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles,
not atoms. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission
to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information
available on the web.
According to Google lore, the company's
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of
each other when they first met in 1995 as graduate students
in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. Larry
was on a weekend visit as a 24-year-old University of Michigan
alumnus. Sergey, 23 at the time, was one of a group of students
assigned to show him around. They argued about every topic that
was discussed. Their strong opinions and differing viewpoints
would eventually find common ground in a unique approach to
solving one of computing's biggest challenges: retrieving relevant
information from a massive set of data.
Larry and Sergey continued to perfect Google's technology through
the first half of 1998. Following a path that would become a
key part of the Google way, they bought a terabyte of disks
at bargain prices and built their own computer housings in Larry's
dorm room, which became Google’s first data center. Meanwhile,
Sergey set up a business office and the two began calling on
potential partners who might want to license search technology
that worked better than any available at the time. Despite the
dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building
their own company around the technology they had developed.
Among those called upon was Yahoo! founder and friend David
Filo. Filo agreed the technology was solid, but encouraged Larry
and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search
engine company. "When it's fully developed and scalable",
he told them, "let's talk again". Others were less
interested in Google as it was now known. One portal CEO told
them, "As long as we're 80 percent as good as our competitors,
that's good enough. Our users don't really care about search."
Unable to interest the major portal players
of the day, Larry and Sergey decided to make a go of it on their
own. All they needed was a little cash to move out of the dorm
and pay off the credit cards they had maxed out buying a terabyte
of memory. So they wrote up a business plan, put their Ph.D.
plans on hold and went looking for an angel investor. Their
first visit was with a friend of a faculty member.
On September 7, 1998 Google Inc. became a reality and opened
its door in Menlo Park, California. Already, Google.com was
answering 10,000 search queries every day, despite still being
in beta. The press began to take notice of the upstart website
with the relevant search results and articles extolling Google
appeared in USA Today and Le Monde. In December, PC Magazine
named Google to its list of the Top 100 Web Sites and Search
Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world.
Google quickly outgrew the confines of
its Menlo Park home and by February 1999, had moved to an office
on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The number of employees had
doubled to eight and the service was answering more than 500,000
queries per day. Interest in the company had grown as well and
RedHat signed on as the first commercial search customer, drawn
in part by Google's commitment to running its servers on the
open source operating system Linux.
Tucked away in one corner of the two story
structure, the Google kernel continued to grow, attracting staff
and clients as well as attention from users and the press. AOL/Netscape
selected Google as its web search service and helped push traffic
levels over the 3 million searches per day mark. It was clear
that Google had evolved from a college research project to a
real company with a product that was in high demand. On September
21, 1999, the beta label came off the website.
And still Google continued to expand. The
Italian portal Virgilio signed on as a client as did Virgin
Net, the UK's leading online entertainment guide. A spate of
recognition followed, including PC Magazine's Technical Excellence
Award for Innovation in Web Application Development and inclusion
in several "Best of" lists, culminating with Google
being named to TIME magazine's Top Ten Best Cybertech list for
1999.
The informal atmosphere bred both collegiality and an accelerated
exchange of ideas. Google staffers made many incremental improvements
to the search engine itself and added such enhancements as the
Google Directory (based on Netscape's Open Directory Project)
and the ability to search via wireless devices. Google also
began thinking globally, with the introduction of 10 language
versions for users who preferred to search in their native tongues.
Google's features and performance attracted
new users at an astounding rate, and the broad appeal of Google
search became apparent when the site was awarded both a Webby
award and a People's Voice Award for technical achievement in
May 2000. Sergey's and Larry's five word acceptance speech:
"We love you, Google users!" The following month,
Google officially became the world's largest search engine with
the introduction of its billion page index, the first time so
much of the web's content was made available in a searchable
format.
Through careful marshalling of its resources,
Google had avoided the need for additional funding rounds beyond
its original venture round. Already a number of clients were
signing up to use Google's search technology on their own sites.
With the launch of a keyword-targeted advertising program, Google
added another revenue stream that began moving the company into
the black. By mid-2000, these efforts were beginning to show
real results and on June 26, Google and Yahoo! announced a partnership
that solidified the company's reputation as not only a great
technology provider, but a substantial business answering 18
million user queries every day.
(from the Official Documentation found on google.com)
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