Google Inc., says Wikipedia.com, is a U.S. public corporation, first incorporated as a privately held corporation in September, 1998, that designs and manages the Internet's most used search engine. The company employs approximately 8,000 employees and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,"[1][2] which refers to a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Google has had a major impact on online culture. The verb "google" was recently added to both the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."[3][4]
Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux.
While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, a 2006 estimate consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world (See Google platform for more details on their technology).[5] According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most popular search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). It receives about a billion search requests per day, which are recorded and stored indefinitely "to improve its search engines."[6]
Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.[7]
They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites 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).[8] It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.[9] A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.[10]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 September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.[11]
In March, 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The company settled into their current home in a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in 2003. The complex has since become known as the Googleplex. Silicon Graphics leased the buildings to Google.
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users. They were attracted to its simple, uncluttered, clean design — a competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on web pages filled with visual distractions. This appearance, while imitating the early AltaVista, had behind it Google's unique search capabilities.
In 2000 Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of hits users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture, then Yahoo! Search Marketing).[12] While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (born August 21, 1973) is an American entrepreneur, according to Wikipedia.org. Born in Russia, Brin studied computer science and mathematics before co-founding Google with Larry Page. Brin is currently the President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at $12.9 billion, making him the 26th richest person in the world.
Sergey was born in Moscow, Russia to a Jewish family. At the age of 6, Sergey and his family emigrated to the U.S. to escape anti-Semitism in what was then the U.S.S.R,[2]. His father is Michael Brin, a mathematician who currently works at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he continues to teach today. His mother is Eugenia Brin, a mathematician and civil engineer by training who currently works as a specialist at NASA. Sergey also has a younger brother Samuel Brin.
Sergey attributes his success to many factors. Growing up during the microcomputer revolution, he had an interest in computers from early in his childhood. He received his first computer, a Commodore 64, as a present from his father on his ninth birthday. Sergey's talent for mathematics and computing was apparent during his first years of schooling.
Sergey attended grade school in the U.S. at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian language skills.
In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Sergey enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study Computer Science and Mathematics, where he received his Bachelors of Science in May 1993 with
high honors. After graduating from Maryland, Sergey received a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which allowed him to study for his masters degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. Sergey received his masters degree in August 1995. Though still enrolled in the Stanford doctoral program, Sergey has suspended his Ph.D. studies indefinitely while he is working at Google.
Sergey expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.
The defining moment for Sergey, however, was when he met future co-president of Google, Larry Page. According to Google lore, Page and Brin "were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995."[3] They soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."[4] The paper has since gone on to become the tenth most accessed scientific paper at Stanford University.
Sergey is often invited to speak at conferences and forums for academia, business, and technology. He has appeared on television shows and documentaries, including the Charlie Rose Show, CNBC and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 Sergey Brin was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders."
Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur. Born in Lansing, Michigan, Page studied computer engineering before co-founding the Google internet search engine with Sergey Brin. Page is currently the President of Products at Google Inc. and has a net worth estimated at $12.8 billion.
Page is a graduate of East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree from Stanford University.[2] According to his personal website, now archived, his office was in the Gates Computer Science Building.[3]
Larry Page is the son of Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science at Michigan State University[4] and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University.
While a student in the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page met Sergey Brin. Together they ran the Google search engine, which began operating in 1998. Google is based on patented PageRank technology, which relies on the structure of links between web sites to determine the ranking of an individual site. Page is still "on leave" from the Ph.D. program.
Page ran Google as co-president with Brin until 2001, when they hired Eric Schmidt to become Chairman and CEO of Google. Page now runs Google as a triumvirate along with Brin and Schmidt.
According to Forbes, Page has an estimated net worth of $12.8 Billion, making him the 27th richest person in the world, one place behind co-founder Brin.
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