The History of Google: How One Company Changed the Way We Search Forever

 

History of Google

The Google company was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which became the most widely used web search engine. Page and Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm initially known as " BackRub " in 1996.

The search engine soon proved successful, and the expanding company moved several times, settling permanently in Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company having its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies.

The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2006, Google Chrome in 2008 and the Google+ social network in 2011, among many other products.

In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the Alphabet Inc. holding company.

The search engine has gone through numerous updates in attempts to combat search engine optimization abuses, provide dynamic results updates, and make the indexing system fast and flexible. Search results began to be personalized in 2005, and Google Suggest autocompletes were introduced. As of 2007, Universal Search provides all types of content, not just text content, in search results.

Google has engaged in partnerships with NASA, AOL, Sun Microsystems, News Corporation, Sky UK and others. The company created an advertising charity, Google.org, in 2005. Google was involved in a 2006 legal dispute in the United States over a court order to disclose URLs and search strings and was the subject of tax avoidance investigations in the United Kingdom.

The name Google is a variant of googol, chosen to suggest very large numbers.

History 

The beginnings 

Google began in 1998 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both PhD students at Stanford University. 

In researching a dissertation topic, Page had considered, among other things, exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, and understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to take this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I've ever received" ) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the assumption that the number and nature of those backlinks were valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in scholarly publishing in mind). 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

In his research project, dubbed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 when Page was among a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to show around campus. Both Brin and Page worked at the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated, universal digital library" and was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Page's web crawler began crawling the web in March of 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data collected for a particular web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, which implemented the algorithm on which the Hyper Search engine was based and invented by the Italian Massimo Marchiori.

By analyzing BackRub's output which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance, the pair realized that a PageRank-based search engine would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines until that time they basically ranked results based on how many times the search term appeared on a page). 

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages should be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their argument as part of their studies and laid the foundation for their search engine. Research. The first version of Google was published in August 1996 on the Stanford website. It was using nearly half of the entire bandwidth of the Stanford network.

The late 90s 

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domains google.stanford.edu  and z.stanford.edu. The google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google, on September 4, 1998, in friend Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki eventually became a Google executive and is now the CEO of YouTube.

Both Brin and Page were against the use of pop-up advertising in a search engine, or an "ad-funded search engine" model, and wrote a 1998 research article on the subject while still students. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads. 

Google's first computer at Stanford was housed in custom cases built with Lego bricks.

At the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The homepage was still marked as "BETA", but an article on Salon.com already claimed that Google's search results were better than competitors such as Hotbot or Excite.com and praised it for being more technologically innovative than overloaded portal sites (such as Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at the time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the web", particularly by stock market investors. 

In early 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million, but Excite rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, told the duo they would pay no more than $750,000, but Bell again rejected it. 

In March of 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to other popular Silicon Valley technology firms. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a Mountain View building complex at Silicon Graphics (SGI)'s 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in 2003.

The company has remained at this site ever since, and the complex it has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a number that equals 1 followed by a googol of zeros).

In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million. 

2000s 

Google's search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.

In 2000, Google began selling ads associated with search keywords. Ads were text-based to maintain a clutter-free page design and to maximize page load speed. Keywords are sold based on a combination of price bid and click, with bids starting at $0.05 per click. This keyword advertising sales model was initially pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off created by Bill Gross.

When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture's services will later be acquired by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing.

The first iteration of Google's production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and were designed to be very fault tolerant

The case was then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license. While many of its dot-com competitors flopped in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly soared as it generated revenue. 

Google's stated code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004 IPO, noting that "We strongly believe that in 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 give up some short-term gains." 

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of the Blogger website. The acquisition ensured the company's competitive ability to use insights gleaned from blog posts to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a product associated with the Google News search engine.

In February 2004, Yahoo! abandoned its partnership with Google, providing its own independent search engine. This cost Google some market share, however the move by Yahoo! highlighted Google's distinctiveness, and today the verb "to google" has entered several languages (first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to search the web" ( a possible indication of "Google" becoming a generic trademark).

After the IPO, Google's market capitalization increased significantly and the share price more than quadrupled.

On August 19, 2004, the number of shares outstanding was 172.85 million, while the " float " was 19.60 million (of which 89% was held by insiders).

Google has a two-class share structure where each Class B share gets ten votes versus each Class A share which gets one. Page said in the prospectus that Google has "a dual-class structure that is geared towards stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me."

In June 2005, Google was valued at approximately $52 billion, making it one of the world's largest media companies by stock value. 

On August 18, 2005 (one year after its initial IPO), Google announced it was selling 14,159,265 shares of its equity to raise funds. The move will double Google's cash reserve to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of businesses, technologies or other ancillary assets". 

As Google has increased in size has come more competition from large traditional tech companies.

One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft had touted its Bing search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Additionally, the two companies increasingly offer overlapping services, such as webmail ( Gmail or Hotmail ), search (both online and local), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Earth ).

As well as a replacement for Internet Explorer, Google has designed its own Linux-based operating system called Chrome OS to compete directly with Microsoft Windows. There were also rumours of a web browser from Google, fueled in large part by the fact that Google owned the "gbrowser.com" domain name. These were later demonstrated when Google released Google Chrome.

This corporate feud ended up in the courts when Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice president of Microsoft, left Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move citing Lee's non-compete agreement (he had access to a lot of sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in China).

Google and Microsoft reached an out-of-court settlement on December 22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential. 

Click fraud also became a growing problem for Google's corporate strategy. Google CFO George Reyes told a December 2004 investor conference that "something needs to be done very, very quickly because I think it potentially threatens our business model." 

While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google experimented with other markets, such as print and radio publications.

On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased radio advertising company dMarc, which provided an automated system that allowed companies to advertise on the radio. Google also began an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with selected advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. 

During Google's third quarter 2005 conference call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same thing like everybody else does. So if you try to predict our product strategy just by saying the right things, has Google and this will same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer: we look at markets as they exist and feel they are quite well served by their existing players, we try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and build."

After months of speculation, Google was added to the Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) index on March 31, 2006. Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major Houston -based oil producer, acquired by ConocoPhillips. The day after the announcement, Google's stock price increased by 7%. 

In 2008, Google launched Knol, their equivalent, which went bankrupt four years later. 

2010s 

In 2011, the company launched Google+, its fourth foray into social networking, following Google Buzz (launched 2010, retired 2011), Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, retired March 1, 2012), and Orkut (launched 2004, retired as of September 2014 )

As of November 2014, Google operated over 70 offices in over 41 countries. 

In 2015, Google reorganized its interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., with Google as the primary subsidiary. Google continued to act as an umbrella for Alphabet's Internet interests.

The relationship between Google, Baidu and Yahoo

On September 1, 2017, Google Inc. announced its restructuring plans as a limited liability company, Google LLC, as a wholly owned subsidiary of XXVI Holdings Inc., which is incorporated as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. to hold the equity of its other subsidiaries, including Google LLC and others. 

On October 25, 2018, The New York Times published the presentation, "How Google Protects Andy Rubin, the 'Father of Android '". The company later announced that "48 employees were fired in the past two years" for sexual misconduct.

On November 1, 2018, Google employees staged a global hike to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints, including former executive Andy Rubin's Golden Parachute release; More than 20,000 employees and contractors attended. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai supported the protests.

Funding 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 grant from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to a company that did not yet exist. 

On June 7, 1999, an equity financing round totalling $25 million was announced, the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. While Google still needed more funding for its further expansion, Brin and Page were reluctant to take the company public, despite financial problems. They weren't ready to relinquish control over Google.

Following the close of the $25 million funding round, Sequoia encouraged Brin and Page to hire a CEO. Brin and Page eventually agreed and hired Eric Schmidt as Google's first CEO in March 2001. 

In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of stock (IPO), Microsoft contacted the company regarding a possible partnership or merger. The deal never materialized.

In January 2004, Google announced it was hiring Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to stage an IPO. The IPO was designed to raise up to $4 billion.

Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered for $85 per share. Of this, 14,142,135 was published by Google and 5,462,917 by shareholder sale. The sale raised $1.67 billion and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many Google employees became paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor to Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owned 2.7 million shares of Google. 

After the company's IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt asked for their base salary to be reduced to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to raise their salaries were turned down, mainly because their main compensation continues to come from owning shares in Google. Before 2004, Schmidt earned $250,000 a year, and Page and Brin each received an annual salary of $150,000. 

There were concerns that Google's IPO could lead to changes in company culture. The reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for reductions in employee benefits to the fact that many corporate executives would become paper millionaires.

In response to this concern, co-founders Brin and Page promised potential investors in a report that the IPO would not change the company's culture. 

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG. When Alphabet was created as Google's parent company, it retained Google's stock price history and ticker symbol.

Name 

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of " googol ", which refers to a number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original PageRank article: "We chose the name of our system, Google, because it is a common misspelling of googol or 10 100 and fits perfectly with our goal of building search engines on a large scale".

There are uses of the name dating back at least as far as the creation of the comic strip character Barney Google in 1919. English children's author Enid Blyton used the phrase "Google Bun" in The Magic Faraway Tree (1941) and The Folk of the Faraway Tree (1946), and called a clown character "Google" in Circus Days Again (1942). There is also the Googleplex Star Thinker in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

In March 1996, a company called Groove Track Productions applied for a US trademark for "Google" for various products including several categories of clothing, plush toys, board games, and candy. The company dropped its application in July 1997. 

Having found more and more space in everyday speech, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet". The use of the term itself reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. The first use of "Google" as a verb in popular culture occurred in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in 2002.

In November 2009, the Global Language Monitor ranked "Google" at number seven on their Top Words of the Decade.

In December 2009 the BBC featured Google in the series "Portrait of the Decade (Words)".

In May 2012, David Elliott filed a complaint against Google, Inc. alleging that Google's trademark, once GOOGLE®, has become generic and devoid of trademark meaning due to its common use as a transitive verb. After losing to Google in UDRP proceedings involving many "Google-related" domain name registrations it owns, Elliott later sought a declaratory judgment that its domain names are rightfully its own, that they do not infringe trademarks which Google may own and all GOOGLE® trademarks of Google should be cancelled as "Google" is now a common worldwide generic word meaning "to search the Internet." 

Partnerships

Google has worked with several companies to improve products and services.

On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA to create a one-million-square-foot (0.0929030 m²) Google Research and Development Center at NASA's Ames Research Center NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio information-nano convergence, and encouraging the entrepreneurial space sector.

The new building would also include laboratories, offices and living quarters for Google engineers.

In October 2006, Google entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems to share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership, Google will hire employees to help the OpenOffice.org open-source office program. 

The unit of AOL, Time Warner 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 partnership, Google plans to partner with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium video service within Google Video. This did not allow Google Video users to search for AOL's premium video services. Google's network-wide display advertising will also increase.

In August 2006, Google signed a $900 million deal with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp. websites including IGN (website), AmericanIdol.com, Fox.com and Rotten Tomatoes, although Fox Sports is not included as an agreement already existed between News Corp. and MSN. 

On 6 December 2006, British Sky Broadcasting published details of a Sky and Google alliance. This includes a feature where Gmail will connect to Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the '@sky.com' email domain.

In 2007, Google used America Online as a partner and primary sponsor of the NORAD Tracks Santa program. Google Earth was first used to give site visitors the impression that they were following Santa's progress in 3D. The program also made its presence known on YouTube in 2007 as part of its partnership with Google. 

In 2008, Google developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite that would provide Google with high-resolution imagery (0.41m black and white, 1.65m colour) for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008. Google also announced in 2008 that it housed an archive of Life Magazine photographs. 

In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, allowing the Pope to have his own YouTube channel. 

In January 2013, Google announced partnerships with Kia Motors and Hyundai. The partnership integrates Google Maps and Place into new car models to be marketed later in 2013. 

The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013; Google is part of the coalition of public and private organizations that also includes Facebook, Intel and Microsoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, A4AI seeks to make internet access more accessible so that access is expanded in developing countries, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help reduce Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly revenues. 

On September 21, 2017, HTC announced a "cooperation agreement" in which it would sell non-exclusive rights to certain intellectual properties, as well as smartphone talent, to Google for $1.1 billion.