What You Always Wanted to Know About Google (But Were Afraid to Ask)

admin | October 18, 2009 | 0 Comments

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Google is certainly one of the most, if not the most, successful and powerful company of the Internet age, and during its short history, this remarkable company has literally transformed the search engine and Internet advertising landscape. What lies at the heart of this amazing company, and its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

The company that would become Google got its start as a research project at Stanford University. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph.D. students, and they started Google in January 1996, believing that a search engine which analyzed the relationships between websites would yield more useful results than those currently on the market.
The domain name google.com was first registered in September of 1997, a full year before the company was incorporated. The company known as Google, Inc. was first incorporated in September of 1998.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s new creation was the epitome of the garage company, taking up residence in the garage of a friend in Menlo Park, California. That garage has since become a landmark in the geek world.
Others in the tech world recognized the value behind Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s idea, and a Sun Microsystems founder was one of the largest initial investors.
The California headquarters of Google is known for its quirky charm. Among the decorations in the lobby are a collection of old lava lamps, old servers and even a piano.
Google has long been known as a great place to work, and its combination of laid back environment, dedicated employees and unmatched benefits is hard o beat. Among the amenities enjoyed by Google workers are exercise rooms, Foosball tables, pool tables and of course video games.
Before Google was a company it was a number. The key difference is in the spelling, with the word googol representing a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. This number is certainly apt, given the huge quantity of web based information the company seeks to organize and rank.
Google was not always called Google. In fact the original nickname Page and Brin gave to their idea was BackRub. The nascent search engine retained this code name while the two studied at Stanford.
The time commitments involved in bringing then BackRub to fruition began to interfere with their scholarly duties, and the pursuit of their Ph.D’s was put on hold to start the company we know today as Google.
Page and Brin were no doubt encouraged by the success of David Filo, founder of future rival Yahoo and also a Stanford alum. The fact that the new startup had already gathered more than a million dollars in funding no doubt had some effect as well.
While at Stanford, Page and Brin had written a paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Search Engine” as part of their doctoral studies. This paper formed a large part of the search engine research that would eventually make Google so effective and so successful.
Even after the dot com crash, Page and Brin recognized that online advertising could be a real revenue source. These visionaries understood that advertisers were willing to pay for high quality screen real estate, and they certainly turned out to be right.
Legend has it that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin got off to somewhat of an unfriendly start when they first met. According to Google legend, when 23-year-old Sergey was assigned to show 24-year-old Larry around the campus they argued on virtually every subject they discussed.
What the two did share, however, was a passion for solving the growing problem of finding relevant search results in the vast expanse of the Internet. This passion would eventually lead to a hugely useful, and hugely profitable, search engine.
Larry is famous in the world of geekdom for having once assembled a working printer out of Lego™ blocks. This ingenuity was born not only of curiosity but of necessity as well.
While other companies were busy buying up the most expensive high-end servers, Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the idea of building a low cost server by using low-end PC equipment instead.
In 1998, the pair continued this process, buying up a terabyte of disk space at bargain prices and building their own computer in Larry Page’s dorm room. This dorm room would become Google’s first data center.
Much of the early purchases made by the two Google founders was financed with credit cards. The duo had maxed out a number of credit cards in pursuit of their dream.
While Google.com was still in beta testing, it was already fielding more than 10,000 search queries every day. This success led to write-ups in a number of major newspapers and magazines, including PC Magazine and even USA Today.
In December of 1998 Google was named one of the top 100 web sites by PC Magazine. The company continued to gain notoriety throughout the coming years.
As late as 1999, Google had only eight employees, a far cry from the eventual size of the company. Even so, this eight employee figure represented nearly a tripling from its early beginnings.
By the time the company had eight employees it was fielding an amazing 500,000 search engine queries every day. People were beginning to notice this new search engine, and reviews were good.
At the current Google headquarters, large exercise balls are often used as office chairs, allowing employees to quickly and easily move around the open space. The space is open and free of the cubicle walls that typify many other corporate environments.
When the headquarters first opened, the desks were in fact not desks at all. In fact, these early desks consisted of nothing more than wooden doors supported by sawhorses. The various workspaces were decorated with an assortment of lava lamps, computer paraphernalia and other eclectic items.
Google has what some consider to be the ultimate corporate motto – “Don’t Be Evil”. In this world of corporate scandals, this unique company mantra is a refreshing change.