Google history in the early years and its growth trend

Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. Google was incorporated in California on September 4, 1998. Google was then reincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002. In July 2003, Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. The company became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO) on August 19, 2004. In October 2015, Google reorganized as a subsidiary of a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, mainly composed of Google employees.

The company’s rapid growth since incorporation has included products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine, (Google Search). It offers services designed for work and productivity (Google’s Docs, Google Sheets, and Google’s Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google’s Calendar), cloud storage (Google’s Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Google’s Duo, Hangouts, Google’s Chat, and Google’s Meet), language translation (Google’s Translate), mapping and navigation (Google’s Maps, Waze, Google Earth, and Street View), podcast hosting (Google Podcasts), video sharing (YouTube), blog publishing (Blogger), note-taking (Google’s Keep and Jamboard), and photo organizing and editing (Google’s Photos). The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google’s Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Google’s Nexus devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including the Google Pixel line of smartphones, Google’s Home smart speaker, Google’s Wifi mesh wireless router, and Google’s Daydream virtual reality headset. Google’s has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier (Google’s Fiber, Google’s Fi, and Google’s Station).

Google.com is the most visited website worldwide. Several other Google-owned websites also are on the list of most popular websites, including YouTube and Blogger.

On the list of most valuable brands, Google is ranked second by Forbes and fourth by Interbrand. It has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, antitrust, censorship,

and search neutrality.

History

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.The project initially involved an unofficial “third founder”, Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company; Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites.They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page’s ideas.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.Hassan as well as Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine was a play on the word “googol”,the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

The domain name www.google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

Google’s was initially funded by an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; the money was given before Google’s was incorporated. Google received money from three other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. Between these initial investors, friends, and family Google’s raised around $1,000,000, which is what allowed them to open up their original shop in Menlo Park, California.

After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin’s initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. Three years later, Google’s bought the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name “Google” had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb “google” to be added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as: “to use the Google’s search engine to obtain information on the Internet”. Additionally, in 2001 Google’s Investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the Chairman and CEO of Google