The birth of a money making machine : google.com
How google.com started up?
In 1995 Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford. Larry was 22, a U Michigan grad, was considering the school; and Sergey, 21, was assigned to show him around.
Every brainy couple when they meet for the first time, they argue about everything and anything. When are brainy enough they usually disagree on everything, no matter what the topic is. Brainy people have brains crowded with knowledge, and crowded too with opinions arising from that huge amount of knowledge. These opinions are usually very strong. Usually also the spectrum that one of the brainy persons covers need not be in the nearby of the spectrum of the other. That is the source of brain storming and personal collision. But when such a pair combine, collaborate, merge or cooperate you get an output nearly equal to the sum of the two spectra excluding the small areas where they agreed.
That what happened with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The pair had strong opinions and divergent viewpoints and the two never agreed on anything, no matter what the topic was. In their case, agreement area is reported as null.
Larry and Sergey began collaboration on a search engine in January 1996 called BackRub, which had a unique ability to analyze black links, pointing to a given website. A year later news started spreading around campus about Larry and Sergey. Their approach to link analysis with BackRub was earning them publicity among those who have seen it.
In 1997 Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google. The word “googol,” is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
The pair continued working to improve their technology throughout the first half of 1998.
Short of cash, Larry and Sergey then went on to build their own computer housing in Larry's dorm room. They called on a friend, David Filo the Yahoo founder who liked their technology. But Filo advised Larry and Sergey to grow the service by themselves and start a search engine company.
The pair designed their business plans and headed out to find an investor. Luckily, they found Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems. After going over Larry and Sergey's business plan Andy knew Google had a lot of potential. Andy was very busy that day and had to rush off during his meeting with Larry and Sergey. He must have been convinced enough with their proposal. Before they had even discussed all the details Andy wrote out a check for $100,000. The check was made out to Google Inc, and was handed over to Larry and Sergey.
This was a real boost to their project, however there was only one problem; Google Inc. had not yet legaly existed, making it impossible to deposit or cash the check. So they were obliged to find other funders and set up a corporation. After finding funders within family and friends, their initial investment rose to almost $1 million dollars.
So on September 1998 Google set up workspace in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park. Google filed for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey opened a bank account in the newly-established company‘s name and deposited Andy Bechtolsheim‘s check. Wojcicki, who is now Google's vice president of product management, didn't work for the company at the time and only knew the Stanford University graduate students because one of her friends had dated Brin. She agreed to rent them her garage for $1,700 a month, where they stayed for five months. Ms Wojcicki is now Google's vice-president of product management, and works at the firm's headquarters in the nearby town of Mountain View.
On October 2006 Google bought a landmark in its history - the suburban home where it was founded in 1998. Google has paid an undisclosed fee for the property in Menlo Park, California, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the business from a garage. Google is not alone in buying its totem place of luck, the garage where they started the company. HP and Apple did the same. HP paid $1.7 million for 12-by-18-foot garage that co-founder William Hewlett first rented for $45 per month.
When Page and Brin first moved into the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors. Today, Google has about $42 billion in cash and a market value of $157 billion.
On June 1999 google made the first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The release quotes Moritz describing “Googlers” as ”people who use Google”. And on December 1999 “The PC Magazine” reported that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes Google as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
On May 2000, the first 10 language versions of Google.com were released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. And on June 2000 google forged a partnership with Yahoo! to become their default search provider. Google announced the first billion-URL index and therefore became the world’s largest search engine. On September 2000 Google started offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of supported languages to 15.
On July 2001 Google launched Image Search, offering access to 250 million images. While on December 2001 Google index size grows to 3 billion web documents.
On February 2002 Google released a
major overhaul for
AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing. and on May the same year, Google announced a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
On October2004 Google formally opened google's office in Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers, a visit from Sergey and Larry, and recognition from the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Mary Harney. On November google's index of web pages reached 8 billion. while on December, The Google Print Program (since renamed
Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford as well as the New York Public Library.
On February 2005 Google hit a milestone in
Image Search with 1.1 billion images indexed. And shortly after,
Google Maps goes live.
In May 2011, unique visitors of Google surpassed 1 billion mark for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from a year ago with 931 million unique visitors. The question is, how we would have been searching now if these two cute brainy couple, that didn't agree on anything at their first meeting, didn't meet? Or met and agreed on everything but didn't make Google?
