History of Google
adnan shuja
was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University in California.[17] 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.[18] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub"
because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a
site.[19][20] A small search engine called Rankdex was already
exploring a similar strategy.[21]
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,[22] 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.[23]
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a
search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and
they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students.
However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple
text ads.[24]
In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to
several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.[25] After
quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of
buildings in Mountain View, California at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.[26] 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.[27]
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing
number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful
results.[28] In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated
with search keywords.[17] The ads were text-based to maintain an
uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.[17]
Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and
clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per click.[17] 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).[29][30][31] 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.[32] Thus,
while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet
marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
[17]
A patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (PageRank)
was granted on 4 September 2001.[33] The patent was officially
assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the
inventor.
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