TheOriginOf.com

March 28, 2007 – 11:28 am

GOOGLE

Google or Google Inc. is an American public company with revenue of more than 10 billion USD specializing in Internet search, online advertising and broad range of online services. It’s headquartered in Mountain View, California and employs more than ten thousand people. “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” is the mission statement of Google.
Origin of Google:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met each other at Stanford University as students of Computer Science. They had different viewpoints but common interests. Together they tried solving the biggest problem of that time: – how to retrieve relevant data from the large sea of data floating on the internet. To tackle this problem they started working together in 1996 on a search engine “BackRub” named so due to its ability to analyze the “back links” which point to a given website. While brainstorming for a new name for the search engine Sean Anderson, his fellow student, suggested “googolplex” and Larry shortened it to “googol”. Sean made a search on the net for the availability whether the name was available or had already been registered. Sean spelt the word wrongly and searched for google.com which was available. The name struck a note with Larry and he registered Google.com for himself and Sergey. Before google.com the search engine used the domain google.stanford.edu using the Stanford University website. On September 14, 1997 the domain google.com was registered and on September 7, 1998 the company was incorporated as “Google Inc.”. “Googol” which was supposed to be the name of the search engine is the mathematical term for “a 1 followed by 100 zeros”. Larry and Sean decided on “googol” as it reflected company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the net.

The story of how “Google Inc” came into existence is really interesting. Larry and Sergey spend a lot of cash on buying memory disks for storing data. They needed money to pay off their bills and get a place of their own as they were still operating from their dorm. After being refused by their friend and founder of Yahoo! David Filo for funds they talked to Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founder members of Sun Microsystems. He looked at the demo of Google and immediately realized the potential it had. As Andy was in a hurry he simply made a check for $ 100,000 in the name of “Google Inc”. At that time “Google Inc” did not exist so to realize the check they collected more funds and started “Google Inc.” with around $ 1 million starting investment.

Growth of Google:
Even in beta stage Google.com was answering more than 10,000 search queries daily. In 1998, Google appeared in article of USA Today and in December in the same year Google featured in the list of Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998 compiled by PC Magazine. In February 1999, the company moved into its new office at 165, University Avenue at Palo Alto which was a home to several other Silicon Valley startups. Soon it started getting around 500,000 queries per day. Red Hat became first commercial customer of Google somewhat drawn by the fact that Google was running its servers on Linux. In a significant development, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, two leading rival venture capitalist firms of Silicon Valley decided to fund Google with $ 25 million. Coming together of two rival companies together underlined their confidence in Google. After getting funds the company’s headquarters were shifted to Mountain View, California called Googleplex which is the company’s present headquarters. After AOL selected Google for its web search service due to which the traffic reached in excess of 3 millions searches per day. The beta label came off from the website on September 21, 1999. In 1999, Google appeared on Time Magazine’s Top Ten Best Cybertech list.

In 2000, Google Directory was added and it went global in real sense when it added the option to search in ten different languages. It became world’s largest search engine when it introduced a billion-page index. When Google signed a partnership with Yahoo it solidified Google’s reputation. At the end of 2000, Google was handling more than 100 million searches daily. In 2001, Dr. Eric Schmidt who had earlier held the posts of CEO at Novell Inc. and CTO of Sun Microsystems joined Google as CEO. Google Image Search was launched in summer of 2001, by December it came out of beta stage with a database of more than 250 million images. At the same time the Google search index crossed the mark of 3 billion searchable web pages.

In May 2002, Google was chosen by America Online to provide advertising and search to millions of members and visitors of AOL sites. In 2003 version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar was released followed soon by Google Deskbar. As the Deskbar was located in the Windows Taskbar now it was not necessary to launch web browser to use Google search. In 2006 Google was added to S&P 500 index.

Google moved into 311,000 square feet of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan in 2006. The office houses the largest advertising team of Google and was specifically designed and built for Google. The same team was instrumental in forging large partnerships, like deals with MySpace and
AOL On October 9, 2006 Google announced that it is acquiring YouTube, a web based platform for watching and sharing videos, for a sum of $1.65 billion in stocks.
Products:
AdWords

Google came out with AdWords in 2000 to provide advertising facility to small businesses. It is a keyword based self-service ad program which can be activated with online by help of a credit card within a few minutes. In February 2002 Google included cost-per-click (CPC) model which made search advertising economical for both small and large businesses. Google AdWords works very well as the ads reach only the people who are using keywords which relate well to that particular ad. This approach has made AdWords extremely popular.
After announcing that it’s going to launch Gmail soon, Google filed for an IPO (initial public offer) with SEC on April 29, 2004. The Google IPO was offered to public on August 19 through Dutch auction process. In October first quarterly results of Google were announced showing revenues to the tune of $800 million.

Google Toolbar

Google introduced the Google Toolbar in 2000 making it possible for surfers to use Google search without visiting the Google webpage. One can also search by right clicking on text within a web document. With help of Google Toolbar keywords can be highlighted in search results. Since its launch the Google Toolbar has been very popular and downloaded by many millions. It also blocks pop-ups and translates webpage into English.

AdSense

In 2003, Google introduced Google AdSense which offered a means to earn revenues on web sites by placing ads along with contents. Google AdSense automatically analyses the content of the web page and places ads which are relevant to the web page increasing the chances of the link to be clicked by the viewers.

Froogle

Froogle was launched in December 2002. It helps the user to many source of a particular product by searching through all the relevant websites. Along with the product information it provides price and images for that particular product.

Gmail

On April 1, 2004 many thought that the announcement by Google to come out with a mail service providing 1 GB storage space was a joke. But soon Gmail was launched and left “Yahoo!” and “hotmail” far behind. It used AdSense to provide relevant ads next to mail messages. It provides a search facility to help you look up for a particular message. You can also chat without downloading any software from the mail page with people you already mail. Currently Gmail offers more than 2800 Mb of storage space.

Google Desktop Search

The first version of Google Desktop Search was released on october14, 2004. It is a free application which can easily locate files like emails, web history, photos etc in your computer. In a later version released in 2005 it also has the capability to locate PDF and mp3 files. It’s available in many languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Dutch.

Google Earth

In 2005 June Google Earth was launched. With help of Google Earth any desired location on earth can be seem. All you have to do is type in you house address, press search and you will be able to see the location. Location of schools, hotels and restaurants can be had from this site along with directions as how to reach the place.

Google Talk

In August 2005 Google Talk was released which provided a free application to communicate with each other via instant messenger along with providing quality voice chat.

Google PageRank
Google uses both hardware and software solutions to make its search engine faster. The hardware part is achieved by networking together of thousands of low cost PC together so as to give huge computing power.
On the software side, Google uses PageRank to rank web pages. It is a system of ranking web pages and was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were at Stanford.  When a web page, say A, gives a link to another page, say B, it is interpreted as a vote by page A for page B. Along with taking into consideration of the number of votes received by a web page the page that casts the vote is also taken into consideration. It means that some when some important site provides link to another page it is sure to improve its ranking.

Google Language Tools
Google Language tools can translate full web pages from one language to another. You can also type text and convert it from language to another. It has become very popular since its launch.

Company Culture:
The atmosphere at Google is very relaxed and informal. There are no cubicles, large rubber exercise balls are used as chairs. The lobby of the head quarter is decorated with piano, lava lamps and you can find bicycles in hallways. There are enough recreation facilities in the campus including a gym, massage room, washers and dryers, video games, pool tables, and table tennis. The snack rooms are always full of cashews, fresh fruits, carrots, cereals, and fresh juice, soda and coffee.

Google has a policy of “Twenty percent” time according to which all engineers working at Google are encouraged to spend one day per week (20%of their time) working on a project that interests them. Gmail, Orkut and AdSense are a result of this.
Google always comes with an April Fool Joke; in 2002 Google claimed that pigeons were responsible for the growth of their search engine. In 2004, they said they are going to open a research facility on Moon. In 2005, a brain-boosting drink called Google Gulp was announced. And in 2006, they came up with Google Romance, a hypothetical online dating service.
Google is givin free broadband … chk this out …

In recognition of its workplace environment “Fortune Magazine” declared Google as the best company to work for in January 2007.
Holiday Logos
Google comes out with special Holiday Logos time to time in sync with coming holidays and events. You can see

Happy Googling