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Google

In 1998 it seemed like Silicon Valley and its dot.com phenonoma was the center of the universe. At Stanford University two graduate students: Larry Page, son of a Computer Science professor at Maryland and Sergey Brin, born in Moscow to Russian parents has been working on search engine technology since they met at a conference in 1995.

At that time search engines usually relied on on-page factors to determine the ranking of web pages in their results. Searching was a bit hit-or-miss, particularly for neophytes who had trouble with advanced search forms and their arcane boolean logic. Page and Brin developed a new way of ranking web pages based on the number of inbound-links. Effectively each inbound-link is treated as a vote for the page. Pages with more inbound-links are deemed to be more important. As a further twist the outbound-links (votes) of more important pages are also given more weight. The PageRank algorithm as a way of sifting the wheat from the chaff of search engine results was born.

The results on Stanford's computers were impressive but to launch their service Page and Brin needed venture capital to buy their own hardware and finance further development. They tried to set up a meeting with Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, another successful Stanford spin-off. Bechtolsheim was interested but was a very busy man, finally they managed to grab a couple of minutes with him in a coffee shop to explain their project, now called Google.

Bechtolsheim immediately offered a check for 100,000 dollars, "we'll work out the details later...", he told them before rushing off to another meeting. There was one big problem, the check was made out to Google Inc., a company that did not yet exist. Fortunately just the rumour that Bechtolsheim had given money was enough to get other venture capitalists running in Google's direction.

Google was launched out of a building in Menlo Park, California on the 7th of September 1998. This was the start of the Googleplex. In addition to Bechtolsheim's initial seed money the pair raised a further $1 million dollars. The following summer two investment capital funds would put up another $25million.

At a time when other search engines were polluting their results with paid inclusion and sponsored links and wrapping the search interface inside a "portal" news of Google spread rapidly, especially amongst computer geeks. By the late spring of 2000 Google was answering 18 million queries each day and had become the biggest search engine on the Web. The interface was incredibly simple - just text box, but thanks to PageRank the results were amazingly good, invariably pulling up the requested information or website in the top ten links. Google often indexed the mass of information that had appeared on company websites better than their internal search interface. This ease of use meant that it was becoming a firm favorite with the increasingly large number of non-expert users on the Web. So much so that the term 'googling for information' has entered everyday speech. In a major coup Yahoo!, the largest website around, decided to use Google to supply its own search results.

Google has sought to extend the reach of its technology to include news sources, weblogs and personal email. The introduction of gmail proved controversial with privacy campaigners who believe that indexing personal email represents an intrusion of privacy. Its Froogle (frugal - groan!) search engine provides price comparisons for users searching for products. Google is built using off the shelf PC hardware configured in a cluster of over 10,000 machines (some people have think they have closer to 50,000 machines) running a customized version of the Linux operating system. On the same day that Microsoft announced the beta launch of its new algorithmic search engine Google doubled the number of pages in their index to a claimed 8 billion pages. Some of these pages may not be fully indexed and return results based on URL and title keywords. This showed that Google was capable of rolling-out changes to its massive array of computers and that it was not afraid to play the marketing game with Microsoft.

For a long time Google resisted the urge to go public. Larry and Serge's leitmotif for the company is 'never do anything evil'. While some people question this the company is viewed a lot more favorably than that other behemoth of computing, Microsoft. Google instead concentrated on building up revenue streams, from selling its search technology to the more recent introduction of the Adwords and Adsense programs. The former lets websites bid on keywords, winners have a small advert placed on the same page as relevant search results or on pages of partners in the Adsense programme. Overall this form of unobtrusive advertising has been well received although some Web users run blocker software on their web browser. Post IPO Google posted a doubling of profits and revenues both of which show strong growth due to online advertising.

Google

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