Google Inc. is an American
public corporation, earning revenue from
advertising related to its
Internet search,
e-mail,
online mapping,
office productivity,
social networking, and
video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the
same technologies. Google has also developed an
open source web browser and a
mobile operating system. The Google headquarters,
the Googleplex, is located in
Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009
(2009 -03-31)[update], the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running millions of servers worldwide, which process hundreds of millions of search requests each day and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour.
[5]
History
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by
Larry Page, who was soon joined by
Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University in
California.
[13] They hypothesized that a
search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.
[14] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked
backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
[15][16] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.
[17]
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. Originally, the search engine used the
Stanford University website with the domain
google.stanford.edu. The domain
google.com was registered on 15 September 1997,
[18] and the company was incorporated as
Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in
Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by
Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of
Sun Microsystems.
[19]
In March 1999, the company moved into offices in
Palo Alto, home to several other noted
Silicon Valley technology startups.
[20] 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.
[21] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since come to be known as the
Googleplex (a play on the word
googolplex). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.
[22]
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results.
[23] In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search
keywords.
[13] The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.
[13] Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per click.
[13] 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).
[24][25][26] Goto.com was an
Idealab spin off created by
Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture's pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google's
AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.
[27] Thus, while many of its
dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
[13]
A
patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (
PageRank) was granted on 4 September 2001.
[32] The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.