began in March 1996 as a research project by and , students at  working on the
(SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a
single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded
through the among other federal agencies. In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the , understanding its link structure as a huge . His supervisor encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got")
and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to
a given page, considering the number and nature of such to be valuable information about that page (with the role of in in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by , a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a .
Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer
of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered
to show around the campus. Page's began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the algorithm.
Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list
of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search
engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing
techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked
results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). A small search engine called was already exploring a similar strategy.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other
highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated
with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their
studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early
1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:
Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in .
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras
and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an
Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have
provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin
has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
-Larry Page firstname.lastname@example.org
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a
search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and
they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students.
However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of ","
which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred
zeros (although Enid Blyton used the word decades earlier in "Google
Bun" - Chapter IX, The Magic Faraway Tree). Having found its way
increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "," was added to the and the in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "", but an article in already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like or , and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded (like , Excite.com, , Netscape's , , and ) which at that time, during the growing , were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
In March 1999, the company moved into offices at in , home to several other noted technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from (SGI) in 1999. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the (a play on the word , a number that is equal to 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for 319 million.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. In 2000, Google began selling associated with search . The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by and rebranded as ). While many of its rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Google's declared is "", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their (aka "S-1") for their ,
noting, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better
served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does
good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
inancing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a $100,000 contribution from , co-founder of , given to a corporation which did not yet exist.
On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced; the major investors being rival venture capital firms and .
In October 2003, while discussing a possible of shares (IPO), approached the company about a possible partnership or . However, no such deal ever materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of and to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.
On April 29, 2004, Google made an for an IPO to raise as much as $2,718,281,828. This alludes to Google's corporate culture with a touch of as ≈ 2.718281828. April 29 was also the 120th day of 2004, and according to section 12(g) of the ,
"a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120
days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10
million in assets and/or 500 shareholders, including people with stock
Google has stated in its annual filing for 2004 that every one of its
3,021 employees, "except temporary employees and contractors, are also
equity holders, with significant collective employee ownership", so
Google would have needed to make its financial information public by
filing them with the SEC regardless of whether or not they intended to
make a public offering. As Google stated in the filing, their, "growth
has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law,
certain private companies must report as if they were public companies.
The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision." The
SEC filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001
and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million
In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, leaving Morgan Stanley and as the joint . They chose the unconventional way of allocating the initial offering through an auction (specifically, a ""),
so that "anyone" would be able to participate in the offering. The
smallest required account balances at most authorized online brokers
that are allowed to participate in an IPO, however, are around
$100,000. In the run-up to the IPO the company was forced to slash the
price and size of the offering, but the process did not run into any
technical difficulties or result in any significant legal challenges.
The initial offering of shares was sold for $85 a piece. The public
valued it at $100.34 at the close of the first day of trading, which
saw 22,351,900 shares change hands.
Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised 1.67 billion, and gave Google a of more than $23 billion.
The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under
Google's control. Many of Google's employees became instant paper
millionaires. , a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.
The company is listed on the stock exchange under the GOOG.
The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and was designed to be very fault-tolerant
In February 2003, Google acquired , owner of , a pioneering and leading
hosting website. Some analysts considered the acquisition inconsistent
with Google's business model. However, the acquisition secured the
company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog
postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a
companion product to the search engine, .
At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 84.7% of all search requests on the through its website and through its partnerships with other clients like Yahoo!, , and .
In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing
an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some , yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness, and today the verb "" has entered a number of languages (first as a verb and now as a standard word), meaning, "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a ).
Analysts speculate that Google's response to its separation from
Yahoo! will be to continue to make technical and visual enhancements to
personalized searches, using the personal data that is gathering from , , and
to produce unique results based on the user. Frequently, new Google
enhancements or products appear in its inventory. Google Labs, the
experimental section of Google.com, helps Google maximize its
relationships with its users by including them in the beta development,
design and testing stages of new products and enhancements of already
After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and
the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of was 172.85 million while the "" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by ).
In January 2005 the number of shares outstanding was up 100 million to
273.42 million, 53% of that was held by insiders, which made the float
127.70 million (up 110 million shares from the first trading day). The
two founders are said to hold almost 30% of the outstanding shares. The
actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google
has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten
votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page says in the
that Google has, "a dual class structure that is biased toward
stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the
team, especially Sergey and me." The company has not reported any holdings as of the Q3 2004 report.
On June 1, 2005, Google shares gained nearly four percent after
Credit Suisse First Boston raised its price target on the stock to
$350. On that same day, rumors circulated in the financial community
that Google would soon be included in the .
When companies are first listed on the S&P 500 they typically
experience a bump in share price due to the rapid accumulation of the
stock within index funds that track the S&P 500. The rumors,
however, were premature and Google was not added to the S&P 500
until 2006. Nevertheless, on June 7, 2005, Google was valued at nearly
$52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by
stock market value.
On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google
announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference
3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would
double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use
the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies
or other assets".
On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with which would involve Google building a 1-million square foot R&D center at NASA's , and on December 31, 2005 's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership—see below.
Additionally in 2005, Google formed a partnership with to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help in the office program .
With Google's increased size comes more competition from large
mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry
between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been touting its
engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two
companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as (Gmail vs. ), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's competes with ). Some have even suggested that in addition to an replacement Google is designing its own -based called Chrome OS to directly compete with . There were also rumors of a Google , fueled much by the fact that Google is the owner of the "gbrowser.com". These were later proven when Google released .
This corporate feud is most directly expressed in hiring offers and
defections. Many Microsoft employees who worked on Internet Explorer
have left to work for Google. This feud boiled over into the courts
when , a former vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by citing Lee's (he had access to much sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in ).
Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on 22 December 2005, the terms of which are confidential.
has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy.
Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference
that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly,
because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model." Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. ,
president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the
least willing to cooperate with advertisers", when it comes to click
While the company's primary market is in the web content arena,
Google has also recently began to experiment with other markets, such
as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced
that it had purchased the radio advertising company , which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio.
This will allow Google to combine two advertising media—the Internet
and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of
consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling
advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and
magazines, with select advertisements in the . They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
During the third quarter 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt
said, "We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you
try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has
this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong
answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty
well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and
new markets using the technology that others use and we build."
After months of speculation, Google was added to the 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006. Google replaced , a major oil producer based in that had been acquired by .. The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%.
Over the course of the past decade, Google has become quite well
known for its corporate culture and innovative, clean products, and has
had a major impact on online culture. In July 2006, the verb, "", was officially added to both the as well as the , meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."
In 2004, Google formed a non-profit philanthropic wing, , giving it a starting fund of $1 billion. The express mission of the organization is to help with the issues of (see also ), global public health, and . Among its first projects is to develop a viable that can attain 100 . 
Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies,
often consisting of innovative teams and products. One of the earlier
companies that Google bought was . They were the creators of ,
a weblog publishing platform, first launched in 1999. This acquisition
led to many premium features becoming free. Pyra Labs was originally
formed by ,
yet he left Google in 2004. In early 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a
company responsible for the online collaborative word processor,
Writely. The technology in this product was combined with Google
Spreadsheets to become .
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would buy the popular online video site for $1.65 billion. The brand, YouTube, will continue to exist, and will not merge with Google Video. Meanwhile, Google Video signed an agreement with and the , for both companies to deliver music videos to the site. The deal was finalized by November 13.
On October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased ,
a company that helped pioneer the market for collaborative, web-based
business software to bolster its position in the online document arena.
On March 17, 2007, Google announced its acquisition of two more companies. The first is 's
software, a company that specializes in developing information
technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated
ways On the same day, Google also announced its acquisition of , a small in-game advertising company based in .
Google also acquired PeakStream Technologies.
Google has worked with several corporations, in order to improve
production and services. On September 28, 2005,Google announced a
long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google
building a 1-million square foot R&D center at NASA's .
NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas,
including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing,
convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry.
The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for
Google engineers. In October 2006, Google formed a partnership with to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the office program .
AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21,
2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a 1 billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL.
As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video
search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This
did not allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video
services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also
In August 2003, Google signed a $900 million offer with Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on and other News Corp. websites including , , Fox.com, and , although is not included as a deal already exists between News Corp. and .
On 6 December 2006, released details of a Sky and Google alliance.
This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail
service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com".
In 2007 Google, displaced as a key partner and sponsor of the program. was used for the first time to give visitors to the website the impression that they were following ' progress in .The program also made its presence known on in 2007 as part of its partnership with Google.
In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the , allowing the to have his own channel on . 
 New mobile top-level domain
In coordination with several of the major corporations, including , , , and , Google provided financial support in the launch of the
top level domain created specifically for the mobile internet, stating
that it is supporting the new domain extension to help set the
standards that will define the future of mobile content and improve the
experience of Google users. In early 2006, Google launched Google.mobi,
a mobile search portal offering several Google mobile products,
including stripped-down versions of its applications and services for
On September 17, 2007, Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service
to its publishing partners providing the ability to monetize their
mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads. Also in September, Google acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi
to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google applications,
and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their
 Legal battles
 Gonzales v. Google
On Wednesday, January 18, 2006, the filed a in in
seeking a court order that would compel search engine company Google
Inc. to turn over, "a multi-stage random sample of one million ",
from Google’s database, and a computer file with, "the text of each
search string entered onto Google’s search engine over a one-week
period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such
query)." Google maintains that their policy has always been to assure its users privacy and anonymity, and challenged the .
On March 18, 2006, a federal judge ruled that while Google must
surrender 50,000 random URLs, the Department of Justice did not meet
the necessary burden to force Google to disclose any search terms
entered by its users.
 See also
- ^ a b c d e "." Google. Retrieved on February 23, 2007
- ^ a b Brin, Sergey; Lawrence Page (1998). . Computer Networks and Isdn Systems 30: 2. . Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- Brin, Sergey; Rajeev Motwani, Terry Winograd (1998). . Data Engineering Bulletin 21: 37--47. . Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- , Award Abstract #9411306, September 1, 1994 through August 31, 1999 (Estimated), award amount $4,516,573.
- Mervis, Jeffrey (2009-01-02). . Science 323 (5910): 54–58. :. . . Retrieved 2009-04-17.
- ^ a b c d e f . "." . August 2005.
- (Fortune, April 2008)
- Page, Lawrence; Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Winograd, Terry. "." November 11, 1999.
- Li, Yanhong. "." Internet Computing, IEEE. 2 (4), July-August 1998, 24-29.
- Downloaded 11-February 2009
- Stross, Randall, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, New York : Free Press, September 2008. Cf. pp.3-4.
- Koller, David. " . January, 2004.
- Hanley, Rachael. "." . February 12, 2003. Retrieved on July 14, 2006.
- Harris, Scott D. "." . July 7, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.
- Bylund, Anders. "." via . July 5, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.
- ^ a b : . , 21 December 1998
- Fried, Ian. "." . October 4, 2002. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Olsen, Stefanie. "." . July 11, 2003. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Staff Writer. "." Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal. June 16, 2006. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Thompson, Bill. "" . December 19, 2003. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Sullivan, Danny. "." The Search Engine Report. July 1, 1998.
- Pelline, Jeff. "." . February 19, 1998.
- Glaser, Ken. "Who Will GoTo.com?" . February 20, 1998.
- ^ a b Kopytoff, Verne; Fost, Dan. "". . April 29, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Hollands, Melanie. "?" Manager's Journal. May 21, 2004.
- Elgin, Ben. "" . August 19, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Webb, Cynthia L. "." . August 19, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- Kuchinskas, Susan. "". . August 9, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
- "Google Shares Rise on New Price Target". . June 1, 2005.
- Gonsalves, Antone. "." Information Week. August 18, 2005.
- Brown, James. "". vnunet.com. October 5, 2005.
- Dvorak, John C. "". . November 16, 2004.
- Vise, David A. "". . September 14, 2005, p. D05.
- Crawford, Krysten. "". . December 2, 2004.
- Levingston, Steven. "". . January 18, 2006.
- Gonsalves, Antone. "". Information Week. January 10, 2006.
- Staff Writer. "". . March 23, 2006.
- Francisco, Bambi. "". . March 23, 2006.
- Mercury News Wire Services. "". . March 24, 2006.
- Harris, Scott D. "". . July 7, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.
- Bylund, Anders. "". via . July 5, 2006. Retrieved on July 7, 2006.
- "." . Retrieved on October 11, 2007.
- Hafner, Katie. "." . September 14, 2006. Retrieved on October 11, 2007.
- La Monica, Paul R. "". . October 9, 2006. Retrieved on October 9, 2006.
- Staff Writer. "". . October 9, 2006. Retrieved on October 9, 2006.
- Staff Writer. "". . November 14, 2006. Retrieved on November 25, 2006.
- Staff Writer. "". October 31, 2006. Retrieved on November 25, 2006.
- from the Official Google Blog.
- from the Official Google Blog.
- Lewis, Laura; Fox, Lynn. "." , Press Release. September 28, 2005.
- Brown, James. "." vnunet.com. October 5, 2005.
- Rosenbush, Steve. "?" . December 21, 2005.
- Staff Writer. "". . August 7, 2006. Retrieved on August 8, 2006.
- "". . August 8, 2006.
- . British Sky Broadcasting. 2006-12-06. . Retrieved 2007-02-08.
- (in en). GISUser.com. . Retrieved 2009-12-31.
- (in en). Search Engine Land. . Retrieved 2009-12-31.
- (in en). Google. . Retrieved 2009-12-31.
- (in en). CNET. . Retrieved 2009-12-31.
- (in en). Search Engine Land. . Retrieved 2009-12-31.
- "." . Retrieved on October 14, 2007.
- Vencat, Emily Flynn. "." . July 17, 2006. Retrieved on October 14, 2007.
- "." . September 17, 2007. Retrieved on October 14, 2007.
- Niccolai, James. "." . September 29, 2007. Retrieved on October 14, 2007.
- January 18, 2006.
 Further reading
- . The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio. (Sept 2005) .
- Stross, Randall, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, New York : Free Press, September 2008.
 External links
- David Hart: , August 17, 2004