Google History

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Google Inc., American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page that is a subsidiary of the holding companyAlphabet Inc. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internetusers’ experience. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brinwhile they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, in California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares, and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock

From the garage to the Googleplex

The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around. By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub.

Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew). The name was a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and aptly reflected Larry and Sergey's mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Searching For Business

Brin and Page, who met as graduate students at Stanford University, were intrigued with the idea of extracting meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room at Stanford to devise a new type of search technology, which they dubbed BackRub. The key was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each Web site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Most search engines simply returned a list of Web sites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Brin and Page incorporated into the search function the number of links each Web site had; i.e., a Web site with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than one with just a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities. Further, a link from a heavily linked Web site would be a more valuable “vote” than one from a more obscure Web site.

So Wait, What's a Search Engine?

A search engine is a program that searches the Internet and finds web pages for the user based on the keywords that you submit. There are several parts to a search engine, such as for instance:

• search engine software including: boolean operators, search fields, display format, etc.
• spider software
• a database
• algorithms that rank results for relevancy

Inspiration Behind the Name

The very popular search engine called Google was invented by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The site was named after a googol - the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros - found in the book "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Edward Kasner and James Newman. To the site's founders, the name represents the immense amount of information that a search engine has to sift through.