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GOOGLE INC.
By: Shain Showers
ID: 150
Dr. Greg Rawski
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GOOGLE INC.
INTRODUCTION
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back
exactly what you want.” –Larry Page
Google Inc. is an American corporation dedicated to providing the finest, most
user-friendly search engine on the Internet today. As the leader in web search today, over
5 million people take advantage of the Google search engine and it’s many perks
(Searches Per Day). The Google name can be found all over the World Wide Web as not
only a search provider, but an email host, social networking site, and even a global
marketplace. Because it is so easy to use and easy to access, Google looks to attract all
Internet users. It’s wide variety of services and diversity of tools it provides makes
Google draw an extremely large crowd of all types of people. Google competes with
other Internet search engines to attract web users all around the world. Google Inc. is well
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known as the cream-of-the-crop in Internet search and therefore makes Google a low-risk
investment.
Google Inc. is a Fortune 500 company whose headquarters are located in
Mountain View, California. It is a multi billion-dollar company whose revenue was
$50.175 billion last year. Owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met as graduate
students at the University of Stanford in 1995. They were computer science students and
both had visions of creating a globalized Internet search engine. Although extremely
gifted in their respective fields of computer sciences, Sergey and Larry had very different
viewpoints on many
topics and finally
found solid ground in
one area they were
both interested in;
retrieving relevant
information from a
massive set of data.
They began their search engine under the name of BackRub, named for its uncanny
ability to analyze “backlinks” to a specific website. Page and Brin’s main focus was to
integrate their newfound technology into the marketplace by allowing the servers to run
on low-end PC’s rather than expensive, large computer machines (Silicon Valley). From
what started off as a project in a college dorm room, Google now has more than 70
offices in over 40 different countries around the globe (Google Corporate Information).
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Known for its user-friendly qualities, Google can be found and used on not only
computers but also cell phones and other wireless devices.
Google makes most of its revenue from advertising and Google websites. In 2012
alone, the company made a total of $50.1 billion in total revenue, the majority coming
from advertising deals (Google Investor Relations). By simply entering a search into a
Google search engine, it is easy to see how other companies would pay the long dollar to
have their websites listed higher in the search results. Their total revenue jumped
significantly from 2011 to 2012, with their revenue being $37.9 billion and $50.1 billion,
respectively– a 32% revenue increase (Google Investor Relations).
HISTORY
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, college graduate students at the University of
Stanford met in 1995 to discuss the idea of a globalized search engine intended to retrieve
pertinent information from huge stores of data. They began building computer housings
in Page’s dorm room and scoured their campus and everywhere they knew to grow their
network as much as possible (Silicon Valley). They called their initial project BackRub, a
nickname provided to encompass
the technology of pointing out
“backlinks” to various
websites. The two company
founders had much financial trouble in
the early stages of the project
mainly because they were full-
time students. Once the two partners were somewhat satisfied with their service, they
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began calling prospective licensors to invest in the project. Many businessmen were very
skeptical of the then BackRub, including Yahoo! Founder David Filo. He belittled their
work and suggested Page and Brin to start up the company unaccompanied. So, in 1996,
the two men accumulated $900,000 in funds from family, friends, etc. and a $100,000
investment from Sun-Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. They added another
staff member at that time, a Director of Technology named Craig Silverstein. It was also
at this time they changed their company name from BackRub to Google (beta version).
The term Google is a play on the word “googol”, meaning a 1 followed by 100 zeros—a
very large goal from the average of 10,000 Google search queries per day at that time.
The first Google logo was created
in 1998 by a team of “doodlers”.
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