Story of Google

Pages 1 – 40

Have you heard of the saying ‘having information at the tip of the fingers?’ Well,
that is a thing of the past. Now it is ‘information at the click of a button’. If people
need help with something or need information, they go to Google, obviously. What
else were you thinking? The whole world googles what they want or like the
smartphone community does, say ‘Ok Google.’ It is pretty sure that everyone has
searched something or the other in Google. But have you ever wondered about
Google. What is it and how it started? Well, this is how it started.

It was at Stanford University, California where Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as
Ph.D. candidates in 1996. They began working together on a project to download the
World Wide Web and figure out a way to search it using links as a possible doctoral
thesis. They came up with a concept of search engine that they were going to name
BackRub. Initially the search engine was made available to students, faculty and
administration at www.googlestanford.edu. One year later in 1997, they renamed it
to Google and in the 15 th of September, the domain google.com was officially
registered. By 1998, Brin and Page’s database included 24 million web pages and it
was still growing. But there was no funding which was a downside. Andy
Bechtolsheim, Co-Founder of Sun Micro System and Vice President of CISCO
System was impressed with the work of Larry and Page and his part turned out to
be a 100,000 dollar cheque, which helped to further develop their search engine.

The first official Google office was in a garage in Menlo Park, California. Google was
doing so well that it was voted among “Top 100 website and search engine for 1998”
by PC magazine. Page and Brin approached two prominent firms for funding. Both
the companies invested 12.5 million dollars and each would have a seat on the Board
of Directors while Page and Brin maintain majority control. By late 1999, Google had
moved to a spacious new office in Mountain View, California. By the middle of 2000,
the ads had turned into a solid revenue system for Google. In less than 3 years
Google had experienced incredible growth. And by the beginning of 2001, it was
handling more than 100 million search queries a day.

Page and Brin hired Eric Schmidt as the CEO of Google to oversee its growth. By the
end of 2002, Google’s balance sheet reflected 440 million dollars in sales and 100
million dollars in profit. Google’s success made Microsoft nervous about losing its
position of dominance in the software industry. As 2003 came to an end, Google’s
site index had grown to include 4.28 billion web pages. The company was being
lauded in the press. It even got named “Brand of the Year’ by Brand channel.
 Pages 41 - 65

Although business was booming, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were convinced that
they could do better. The web based email service now we call gmail, was launched
in 2004. It quickly began to outrank the services being offered by companies such as
Microsoft and Yahoo. It was also the year Google took a huge step in their growth.
They introduced a fascinating program called Google Earth. Google’s growth
skyrocketed to levels nobody imagined it would. Larry Page rang the opening bell at
NASDAQ stock market in New York city. Larry Page and his partner Sergey Brin
were now multimillionaires.

In 2006, Google video was introduced to the public, as the next step in Google’s
stellar growth. In October 2006, Google paid 1.65 billion dollars in stock to buy
YouTube, a popular online site. By the end of 2006, it was far and away the most
used search engine on the web with a market share of more than 50 percent. “I think
we all feel tremendous amount of responsibility for getting many, many people their
information” Larry Page said. And nothing can be truer than that. What started as a
possible doctoral thesis for two young college students resulted in being one of the
most used and appreciated services. And this is the success story of Google.