Google began in March 1998 as a research project by
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at
Stanford University.
[2]
In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the
World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge
graph.
[3] His supervisor,
Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"
[4])
and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a
given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of
such backlinks was valuable information for an analysis of that page
(with the role of
citations in
academic publishing in mind).
[3]
In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
[5]
Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer
of 1995—Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had
volunteered to show around the campus.
[3] Both Brin and Page were working on the
Stanford Digital Library Project
(SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a
single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded
through the
National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.
[5][6][7][8]
Page's
web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.
[3] To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the
PageRank algorithm.
[3]
While analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a
list of backlinks ranked by importance—the pair realized 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).
[3][9]
A small search engine called "
RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of
Dow Jones) designed by
Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.
[10] The technology in RankDex was patented
[11] and used later when Li founded
Baidu in China.
[12][13]
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:
[14]
-
- 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 a 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 page
cs.stanford.edu[citation needed]
Late 1990s
Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google, on September 4, 1998 at a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California.
The first patent filed under the name "Google Inc." was filed on
August 31, 1999. This patent, filed by Siu-Leong Iu, Malcom Davis, Hui
Luo, Yun-Ting Lin, Guillaume Mercier, and Kobad Bugwadia, is titled
"Watermarking system and methodology for digital multimedia content" and
is the earliest patent filing under the assignee name "Google Inc."
[15][16]
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. They
changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.
[17]
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.
[18] The home page was still marked "
BETA", but an article in
Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like
Hotbot or
Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded
portal sites (like
Yahoo!, Excite.com,
Lycos, Netscape's
Netcenter,
AOL.com,
Go.com and
MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing
dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
[18]
In March 1999, the company moved into offices at
165 University Avenue in
Palo Alto, home to several other noted
Silicon Valley technology startups.
[19] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in
Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from
Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.
[20] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the
Googleplex (a play on the word
googolplex, a number that is equal to 1 followed by a
googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million.
[21]
2000s
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.
[22] In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search
keywords.
[2] The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.
[2] Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click.
[2] This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by
Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by
Yahoo! and rebranded as
Yahoo! Search Marketing).
[23][24][25] While many of its
dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
[2]
Google's declared
code of conduct is "
Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their
prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004
IPO,
noting that "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."
[26]
Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000 contribution from
Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of
Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.
[27]
On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced;
[28] the major investors being rival venture capital firms
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and
Sequoia Capital.
[27]
While Google still needed more funding for their further expansion,
Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public, despite their
financial issues. They were not ready to give up control over Google.
Following the closing of the $25 million financing round, Sequoia
encouraged Brin and Page to hire a CEO. Brin and Page ultimately
acquiesced and hired
Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in March 2001.
[29]
In October 2003, while discussing a possible
initial public offering of shares (IPO),
Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or
merger.
[30] The deal never materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of
Morgan Stanley and
Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.
Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004.
[31] A total of 19,605,052
shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.
[32] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as
√2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a
market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
[33] Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires.
Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.
[34]
The company is listed on the
NASDAQ stock exchange under the
ticker symbol GOOG.
After reporting earnings on the 17th of October 2013, the stock price
of GOOG closed above $1,000.00 for the first time in its history of
trading on the NASDAQ.
[35]
