THE HISTORY OF GOOGLEThe internet is one (if not) the biggest fastest forms of communication we use in this world.
It’s used to connect people to one another from any point on the earth. The internet also consist of a large number of search engine. Each search engine can look up and find about anything you are looking for. One of the biggest search engines today is google.
Google is a play on the word googol. Googol was coined by a man named Milton Sirotta. Milton Sirotta was the nephew of an American mathematician Edward Kasner and James Newman. The word googol means the number represented by the number one followed by a hundred zeros.
Google used that term because the internet seems to have infinite amount of information, and there doesn’t seem to be a name more suitable. The two founders of google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They both were graduate students at Stanford university in computer science in 1995. During the month of January of 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on a search engine they named Backrub. They used this name because of its ability to analyze the back links pointing to a given website.
Larry Page took on the task of creating a new kind of internet server source that would use low-end PCs instead of the big expensive machines. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept working to make their technology as perfect as they could for the first half of 1998. They purchased a terabyte of disks at low bargain prices. They built their own computer center in Larry’s Page’s dorm room. The computer center in Pages room actually later became google’s first data center. While working on that Brin had opened to find potential partners that might want to license a search technology better than any other available.
One of the potential partners they called was a friend of there’s (who is the founder of yahoo) David Filo. Filo agreed that Page and Brin had technology that was very solid. He advised Page and Brin to develop there service themselves by starting a search engine company. No other potential partners were interested in google.
A portal CEO told Page and Brin “as long as were 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really core about search. Although Page and Brin were unable to interest the major portal players, they decided to go at it alone. All they needed was more money out of the dorm, and to clear up unpaid credit cards they used up by buying a terabyte of memory. One day Page and Brin came across Andy Bechtolsheim.
Bechtolsheim is one of the founders of sun Microsystems. He took one look at the demo of google (Page and Brin had created) and he knew it had a lot of potential. At the time Bechtolsheim was in a rush, so since he liked what he saw he wrote Page and Brin a check for one thousand dollars. Unfortunately since there was no legal company know as “google inc. ” they couldn’t deposit the check. They held on to it while they scrambled to set up a corporation.
While looking for funding there total investment was almost one million dollars. On September 7, 1998, google inc. opened google inc. first home.
It was a space attached to a friends garage. They hired there first employee there. Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired and was named googles director of technology. Google. com (still in beta) was growing and was answering 10,000 search queries each day.
The media began to notice the new search engine and by December of 1998 PC magazine named google one of its top 100 web sites and search engines. The more the media noticed google the more it moved up in the world. By feburary of 1999 google had grown substantially larger and had to move from its small home Menlo Park. Google inc. moved to an office on university avenue in Palo Alto.
At this point google inc. had eight employees, and the service was answering more than five hundred thousand queries per day. Now that google was growing more company’s became interested in the service. Red hat signed on as google’s first commercial search customer. Google had begun to encounter gridlock so they alleviated the problem with a move to the googleplex.
That’s googles current headquarters in mount vice, California. Both aol and nestscape decided on google aas there web search service. By doing so aol and nestscape helped push traffic levels post three million searches per day. Google continuously kept growing. Google went international when Italian Portal Virgilo, Virgin net, and the Uk’s leading online entertainment guide signed on as a client. The growth of google bought in awards like the technical excellence award for innovation in web application development from PC magazine and inclusion in several best of list.
At the googleplex, they foster a relaxed mood which promotes a positive work drive. TLC googleplex office has things such as large rubber exercise balls in place of chairs, large dogs, and open space opposed to cubicals. Moreover the googleplex parking lot were used to roller hockey games twice a week. The people at googleplex believe that a relaxed work enviorment fosters an accelerated exchange of ideas and collegiality.
Some of google’s improvements include the google dictionary and the ability to search via wireless devices. Also, google has made itself more marketable by introducing ten language versions. Googles accomplishments are beginning to fill their mantle. Google was awarded the webby award and a people’s voice award for technical achievement in May 2000. After introducing a billion page index.
Google became the world’s largest search engine. This billion page index allows so much of the webs content to be accessed in a searchable format. On June 26, google and yahoo announced a new partnership. Moreover, partnership deals were announced with china’s leading portal Netease and NEC’s BIGLOBE portal in Japan.
Both added google to their sites. On June 26 google and yahoo announced to the world that the two server giants started a partnership. After that partnership was bought out, in the following months numerous partnerships with google were announced with companys like: netscape and nec’s biglobe (which portals in japan). In late 2000 google enhanced user’s power by allowing users to search anywhere on the web.
Google helped enhance this by introducing the google toolbar. At the conclusion of 2000 google was handling over a hundred million search queries a day. That still wasn’t enough for google inc. because they where still searching for new ways to connect people with information they need. Meanwhile, google had taken on a cornerstone of internet culture.
In Feburary google took on the assets of Deja. com and began the arduous task of intergrating the huge volume of data in the internets largest usenet archive into a searchable format. Basically what that means is that google provided the searchers with improved postings, post removal, and threading of the 500 million plus messages exchanged over the years. As google saw there global audience continue to grow, they noticed a lot of search queries. By noticing these queries google noticed where humanity’s mind was at. Google sat down and sort through countless numbers of keywords and captured the top searches and came up with the google zeitgeist.
Googles definition of the google zeitgeist as ” a showcase of rising and falling stars in the search firmament as names and places flicker from obscurity to center stage and fade back again. ” Over the years to come, google’s capabilities multiplied. Even down to the company’s financial footing became even more secure. Toward the beginning of the fourth quarter in 2001, google announced that they had discovered what a lot of other online company’s couldn’t and that’s “profitability”.
Googles popularity kept growing and as a result of that so did the ” circle of friends” as they called it. Google reached an agreement with lycris korea which brought googles search to a new group of asian internet users. Later in October of 2001 google developed a partnership with Universo online. With this partnership this mad google latin america’s premier search engine. Now that google had gone international, they opened new sales offices in hamburg and Tokyo to satisfy the growing international interest in googles advertising programs. Now that google went international users could limit there search to sites written in Arabic, Turkish, or any of 26 other languages.
Google then added a few new features file type search added a dozen formats to googles roster of searchable documents. In the month of December google launched a new feature called google image search. Google image search first launched during the summer with 250 million images. And came out of beta with advanced search added and expanded image index.
Google to a stop forward and introduced the google catalog search. Google users were able to search over 1,100 mail order catalogs that were in the past only available in print. Also in deeember google reached a huge mile stone when the google search index reached three billion searchable web documents. This was another leap forward toward google achieving there goal to make the world’s information accessible.
Googles year came to a close appropriately with the year end google zeitgeist a retrospective on the search patterns, trends, and top search terms of 2001. In febuary of 2002 google introduced the google search appliance. Google search appliance is a plug-and-play search solution in a bright yellow box. Soon it had e-commerce sites, university networking, and company intranet, with organizations from boeing to the university of florida powering their searches with google in a box.
The 2001 search engine watch awards ( which was announced in febuary 2002) awarded google top honors for outstanding search service, best image search engine, best design, most webmaster friendly search engine, and best search feature. Google showed its love for its users by bringing forth the google programming contest. This contest daunted challenge with a tempting prize of ten thousand dollars, a visit to the googleplex, and a chance for the winner to spend some quality time with the google code base. The contest was later one by Daniel Egnor who went on to create a program enabling users to search for webpages within a specified geographic area. In the year 2004 google achieved new services. One of those services was local search for those times when all a person needs is a neighborhood place close enough to deliver, pick up something in driving distance or walking distance.
On april 1 google announced it was offering free emails with 1,000 megabytes of memory and had plans to open an engineering office on the moon. In conclusion the internet is a rapid growing machine. It consist of many different areas. One of the internets major areas is the search engines. Right now google is the one of the biggest search engines if not the biggest.
Google went from a small company first in a dorm room, to a garage, to a front office, and now talk of an office on the moon. That alone goes to show just how important search engines are on the web and how many people need and use them.
