Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
was officially launched in 1998 by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unt ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was the ...
to market
Google Search
Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world.
The ...
, which has become the most used
web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
in California, developed a search algorithm at first known as "
BackRub
Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search al ...
" in 1996, with the help of
Scott Hassan
Scott Hassan is a computer programmer and entrepreneur who was the main programmer of the original Google Search engine, then known as BackRub. He was research assistant at Stanford University at the time. Hassan left before Google was officially ...
and
Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at
Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched
Google News
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Google rel ...
in 2002,
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP an ...
in 2004,
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
in 2005,
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
in 2008, and the
social network
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...
known as
Google+
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition to
many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company
Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and sev ...
The search engine went through many updates in attempts to eradicate
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "Organ ...
Google has engaged in partnerships with
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
,
AOL
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017 ...
,
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
,
News Corporation
News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp.), also variously known as News Corporation Limited, was an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Ne ...
,
Sky UK
Sky UK Limited is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company that provides television and broadband Internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is a subsidiary of ...
, and others. The company set up a charitable offshoot,
Google.org
Google.org, founded in October 2005, is the charitable arm of Google, a multinational technology company. The organization has committed roughly US$100 million in investments and grants to nonprofits annually.
The organization is noted for se ...
, in 2005.
The name Google is a misspelling of
Googol
A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ...
, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
History
Beginnings
Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unt ...
and
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was the ...
when they were both PhD students at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
in
Stanford, California
Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is the home of Stanford University. The population was 21,150 at the United States Census, 2020, 2020 census.
Stanford is ...
.
[Our history in Depth]
" Google, Retrieved on March 29, 2016 The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder",
Scott Hassan
Scott Hassan is a computer programmer and entrepreneur who was the main programmer of the original Google Search engine, then known as BackRub. He was research assistant at Stanford University at the time. Hassan left before Google was officially ...
, the lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original
Google Search
Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world.
The ...
engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company;
Hassan went on to pursue a career in
robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...
and founded the company
Willow Garage
Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was most likely best known for its open source software suite ROS (Robot ...
in 2006.
In the search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering among other things exploring the mathematical properties of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
, understanding its link structure as a huge
graph
Graph may refer to:
Mathematics
*Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges
**Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties
*Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...
.
[ Battelle, John.]
The Birth of Google
." ''Wired
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...
''. August 2005. His supervisor,
Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intell ...
, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such
backlink
A backlink is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent). A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory.
A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. The quantity, q ...
s was valuable information about that page (with the role of
citation
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...
s in
academic publishing
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
in mind).
Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.
The research project was nicknamed "BackRub", and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco.
Both Brin and Page were working on the
Stanford Digital Library Project
The Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP) (also called The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project and The Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project) was a research program run by Hector Garcia-Molina, Terry Winograd, Dan Boneh, and Andr ...
(SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
, among other federal agencies.
Brin and Page were also part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
(CIA) and the
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...
(NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors.
Page's
web crawler
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...
began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.
To convert the backlink data that is gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
algorithm.
While analyzing BackRub's output which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance, the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).
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. The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website. It used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.
Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google.
Rajeev Motwani
Rajeev Motwani (Hindi: राजीव मोटवानी
, March 24, 1962 – June 5, 2009) was an Indian American professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early ad ...
and
Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intell ...
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
Héctor García-Molina (15 November 1954-25 November 2019) was a Mexican-American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was advisor to Sergey Brin, the founde ...
and
Jeff Ullman
Jeffrey David Ullman (born November 22, 1942) is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers (various editions are popularly known as the Pri ...
were also cited as contributors to the project.
PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for
RankDex
Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the la ...
, developed by
Robin Li
Robin Li Yanhong (; born 17 November 1968) is a Chinese software engineer and billionaire internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the search engine Baidu. As of March 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$8.5 billion.
Li studied inform ...
in 1996. Larry Page's patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li's earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine
Baidu
Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the la ...
in 2000.
Late 1990s
Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domains ''google.stanford.edu'' and ''z.stanford.edu''. The domain ''google.com'' was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, ''Google'', on September 4, 1998 in their friend
Susan Wojcicki
Susan Diane Wojcicki ( ; born July 5, 1968) is a Polish-American business executive who is the CEO of YouTube. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022.
Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over 20 years. She became invol ...
's garage in
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; ...
. Wojcicki eventually became an executive at Google and is now the CEO at
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
.
![Google’s First Production Server](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg)
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. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.
Scott Rosenberg
Scott Rosenberg (born April 24, 1963) is an American screenwriter, film producer, and actor.
Life and career
Rosenberg was born in Needham, Massachusetts, to a Jewish family. After high school graduation in 1981, he attended Boston Universit ...
:
Yes, there is a better search engine. While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire
''. Salon.com
''Salon'' is an American politically progressive/liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events.
Content and coverage
''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, including re ...
, 21 December 1998 The home page was still marked "
BETA
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...
", but an article in
Salon.com
''Salon'' is an American politically progressive/liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events.
Content and coverage
''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, including re ...
already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like
Hotbot
HotBot was an American web search engine owned by Lycos. It was launched in May 1996 by ''Wired'' magazine. During the 1990s, it was one of the most popular search engines on the World Wide Web.
History
HotBot was launched in May 1996 by HotWir ...
or
Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded
portal site
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
s (like
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
, Excite.com,
Lycos
Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...
, Netscape's
Netcenter
Netcenter, located in the independent city of Hampton, Virginia, is a former shopping mall redeveloped beginning in 2000 and converted into a business center with supporting retail, personal services and food service amenities. It was the first ...
,
AOL.com
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...
,
Go.com
Go.com (also known as The Go Network) is a portal for Disney content that was created after The Walt Disney Company acquired the search engine Infoseek. Go.com is operated by Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, one of four divisions of the ...
and
MSN.com
MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95.
The Microsoft Net ...
) which at that time, during the growing
dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...
, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to
Excite
Excitation, excite, exciting, or excitement may refer to:
* Excitation (magnetic), provided with an electrical generator or alternator
* Excite Ballpark, located in San Jose, California
* Excite (web portal), web portal owned by IAC
* Electron ex ...
. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer.
Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such ...
, one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it.
In March 1999, the company moved into offices at
165 University Avenue
165 University Avenue or Lucky Building or Karma Building is a small rented office building on University Avenue, the main commercial street in downtown Palo Alto, California, that gave rise to Plug and Play Tech Center and to the Amidi Group. It i ...
in
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was estab ...
, home to several other noted
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
technology startups.
[Fried, Ian.]
A building blessed with tech success
." ''CNET
''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...
.'' October 4, 2002. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in
Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...
(SGI) in 2003.
The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the
Googleplex
The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
The original complex, with of office space, is the company's second la ...
(a play on the word
googolplex
A googolplex is the number 10, or equivalently, 10 or 1010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . Written out in ordinary decimal notation, it is 1 fol ...
, a number that is equal to 1 followed by a
googol
A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ...
of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million.
[Staff Writer.]
Google to buy headquarters building from Silicon Graphics
." ''Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal.'' June 16, 2006. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
2000s
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.
[Thompson, Bill.]
Is Google good for you?
" ''BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...
.'' December 19, 2003. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
associated with search
keywords.
The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.
Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click.
This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by
Goto.com, an
Idealab Idealab (formerly known as idealab!) is a startup studio based in Pasadena, California, U.S.A.
History
Idealab was founded by Bill T. Gross (not to be confused with the founder of PIMCO, Bill H. Gross) in March 1996. Prior to Idealab, Gross founde ...
spin-off created by
Bill Gross.
When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later be bought by
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
and renamed
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! Native (formerly known as Yahoo! Advertising, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Gemini) is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!, Yahoo.
Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Servic ...
. The case was then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.
[Sullivan, Danny.]
GoTo Going Strong
." ''The Search Engine Report.'' July 1, 1998.[Pelline, Jeff.]
Pay-for-placement gets another shot
." ''CNET
''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...
.'' February 19, 1998.[Glaser, Ken. "Who Will GoTo.com?]
OnlinePress.com
.'' February 20, 1998.'' While many of its
dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Google's declared
code of conduct
A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party or an organization.
Companies' codes of conduct
A company code of conduct is a set of rules which is commonly writt ...
is "
Don't be evil
"Don't be evil" is a phrase that was used in Google's corporate code of conduct, which it also formerly preceded as a motto.
Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the r ...
", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their
prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004
IPO
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
, noting that "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
In February 2003, Google acquired
Pyra Labs
Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003.
History
Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web ...
, owner of the Blogger website. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine
Google News
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Google rel ...
.
In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some
market share
Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...
, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness. The verb "
to google" has entered a number of languages (first as a
slang
Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gro ...
verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a
genericized trademark
A generic trademark, also known as a genericized trademark or proprietary eponym, is a trademark or brand name that, because of its popularity or significance, has become the generic term for, or synonymous with, a general class of products or ...
).
![Google Baidu and Yahoo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Google_Baidu_and_Yahoo.JPG)
After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004, the number of
shares outstanding
Shares outstanding are all the shares of a corporation that have been authorized, issued and purchased by investors and are held by them. They are distinguished from treasury shares, which are shares held by the corporation itself, thus representi ...
was 172.85 million while the "
free float
In the context of stock markets, the public float or free float represents the portion of shares of a corporation that are in the hands of public investors as opposed to locked-in shares held by promoters, company officers, controlling-interest inv ...
" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by
insider
''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publ ...
s). Google has a dual-class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page said in the
prospectus that Google has "a dual-class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me."
In June 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by stock market value.
On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as
π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets".
With Google's increased size came more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft had been touting its
Bing
Bing most often refers to:
* Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer
* Microsoft Bing, a web search engine
Bing may also refer to:
Food and drink
* Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread
* Bing (soft drink), a UK brand
* Bing cherry, a varie ...
search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as
webmail
Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, G ...
(Gmail vs.
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's
Windows Live Local competes with
Google Earth
Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...
). In addition to an
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
replacement, Google designed its own
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
-based
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
called
ChromeOS
ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...
to directly compete with
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
. There were also rumors of a Google
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
, fueled much by the fact that Google was the owner of the
domain name
A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
"gbrowser.com". These were later proven when Google released
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
. This corporate feud boiled over into the courts when
Kai-Fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee (; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, businessman, and writer. He is currently based in Beijing, China.
Lee developed a speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie ...
, a former vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by citing Lee's
non-compete contract (he had access to much sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
). Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on December 22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential.
Click fraud
Click, Klick and Klik may refer to:
Airlines
* Click Airways, a UAE airline
* Clickair, a Spanish airline
* MexicanaClick, a Mexican airline
Art, entertainment, and media Fictional characters
* Klick (fictional species), an alien race in the g ...
also became a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."
While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has experimented with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company
dMarc
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email authentication protocol. It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing. Th ...
, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. Google also began an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the ''
Chicago Sun-Times
The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the ''Chicago T ...
''.
During the third quarter of 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build."
After months of speculation, Google was added to the
Standard & Poor's
S&P Global Ratings (previously Standard & Poor's and informally known as S&P) is an American credit rating agency (CRA) and a division of S&P Global that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks, bonds, and commodities. S&P is con ...
500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006. Google replaced
Burlington Resources
Burlington Resources Inc. was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. In 2006, the company was acquired by ConocoPhillips.
History
In 1988, the company was formed to own the resource assets of Burlington Northern Railroad. The company became ...
, a major oil producer based in
Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...
that had been acquired by
ConocoPhillips
ConocoPhillips Company is an American multinational corporation engaged in hydrocarbon exploration and production. It is based in the Energy Corridor district of Houston, Texas.
The company has operations in 15 countries and has production in ...
. The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%.
In 2008, Google launched
Knol
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The lower-case term ''knol'', which Google defined as a "unit of knowledge", referred to an article in the project. Knol was often viewed as a rival to W ...
, their own equivalent of Wikipedia,
which failed four years later.
Use of cookies
Although Google was already deriving the vast majority of its income from advertising at the time of its 2004 IPO, it did not use any
HTTP cookie
HTTP cookies (also called web cookies, Internet cookies, browser cookies, or simply cookies) are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's w ...
-based
web tracking
Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors’ activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the ...
until during the
2007-2008 financial crisis on Google.
By 2006, Google's Ad revenue was already facing signs of decline, as "a growing number of advertisers were refusing to buy display ads from Google."
The financial crisis pushed Google into a hiring freeze, and potentially to the edge of bankruptcy if ad revenue would keep declining. With a market cap of more than $100 billion, if Google was to go bankrupt, it would have serious implications on a stock market that was already seriously hit by the crisis (see
United States bear market of 2007–2009
The US bear market of 2007–2009 was a 17-month bear market that lasted from October 9, 2007 to March 9, 2009, during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. The S&P 500 lost approximately 50% of its value, but the duration of this bear market was ...
).
In 2007, Google agreed to buy
DoubleClick
DoubleClick Inc. was an advertisement company that developed and provided Internet ad serving services from 1995 until its acquisition by Google in March 2008. DoubleClick offered technology products and services that were sold primarily to adv ...
for $3.1 billion, marking the start of its use of cookie-based tracking.
Even with the purchase, Google only ended up with a 3% revenue in the second quarter of 2009, in the depth of the recession.
Google initially separated the browsing habits collected from AD tracking from data collected by its other services by default. Google removed this last layer of protection in 2016, making its tracking personally-identifiable.
2010s
In 2011, the company launched
Google+
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, its fourth foray into social networking, following
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages and ...
(launched 2010, retired in 2011),
Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect was a free social networking site from 2008 to 2012. Similar to Facebook Platform and MySpaceID, it took a decentralized approach, allowing users to build a profile to share and update information (through messaging, photogr ...
(launched 2008, retired by March 1, 2012), and
Orkut
Orkut was a social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökt ...
(launched in 2004, retired in September 2014)
As of November 2014, Google operated over 70 offices in more than 41 countries.
In 2015, Google reorganized its interests as a holding company,
Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and sev ...
, with Google as its leading subsidiary. Google continued to serve as the umbrella for Alphabet's Internet interests. On September 1, 2017, Google Inc. announced its plans of restructuring as a
limited liability company
A limited liability company (LLC for short) is the US-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that can combine the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorship with the limited liability of a ...
, Google LLC, as a wholly owned subsidiary of
XXVI Holdings, Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and se ...
, which is formed as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. to hold the equity of its other subsidiaries, including Google LLC and other bets.
Between 2018 and 2019,
tensions between the company's leadership and its workers escalated as staff protested company decisions on internal sexual harassment,
Dragonfly
A dragonfly is a flying insect belonging to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata. About 3,000 extant species of true dragonfly are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threate ...
, a censored Chinese search engine, and
Project Maven A military artificial intelligence arms race is a competition or arms race between two or more states to have their military forces equipped with the best artificial intelligence (AI). Since the mid-2010s many analysts have noted the emergence of su ...
, a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for the company.
On 25 October 2018, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' published an exposé, "How Google Protected
Andy Rubin
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in ...
, the 'Father of Android'". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct. On 1 November 2018, Google employees staged a global walk-out to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints, including the
golden parachute
A golden parachute is an agreement between a company and an employee (usually an upper executive) specifying that the employee will receive certain significant benefits if employment is terminated. These may include severance pay, cash bonuses, s ...
exit of former executive
Andy Rubin
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in ...
; more than 20,000 employees and contractors participated. CEO
Sundar Pichai
Pichai Sundararajan (born June 10, 1972), better known as Sundar Pichai (), is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google.
Born in Madurai, India, Pichai earned hi ...
was reported to be in support of the protests.
On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a
cloud gaming
Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game rem ...
platform called
Google Stadia
Stadia is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Google. Known in development as Project Stream, the service debuted through a closed beta in October 2018, and publicly launched in November 2019. The service was to compete with Sony' ...
.
On June 3, 2019, the
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...
reported that it would investigate Google for
antitrust
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...
violations. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the
search
Searching or search may refer to:
Computing technology
* Search algorithm, including keyword search
** :Search algorithms
* Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence
* Search engine technology, software for findi ...
and
search advertising In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other pub ...
markets.
In December 2019, former
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
chief operating officer
A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the "C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...
Bill Ready became Google's new commerce chief. Ready's role will not be directly involved with
Google Pay Google Pay may refer to:
* Google Pay (mobile app), a mobile payments app introduced in 2020
* Google Pay (2018–2022), a digital wallet app introduced in 2018, now Google Wallet
* Google Pay (payment method), a digital payments service introduced ...
.
2020s
In April 2020, due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
, Google announced several cost-cutting measures. Such measures included slowing down hiring for the remainder of 2020, except for a small number of strategic areas, recalibrating the focus and pace of investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non-business essential marketing and travel.
The
2020 Google services outages disrupted Google services: one in August that affected Google Drive among others, another in November affecting YouTube, and a third in December affecting the entire suite of Google applications. All three outages were resolved within hours.
In January 2021, the
Australian Government
The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government i ...
proposed legislation that would require Google and Facebook to pay media companies for the right to use their content. In response, Google threatened to close off access to its search engine in Australia.
In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for
Ubisoft
Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Assassin's Creed'', ''Far Cry'', '' ...
ports on
Google Stadia
Stadia is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Google. Known in development as Project Stream, the service debuted through a closed beta in October 2018, and publicly launched in November 2019. The service was to compete with Sony' ...
. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as
Ubisoft
Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Assassin's Creed'', ''Far Cry'', '' ...
and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia.
In April 2021, ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' reported that Google ran a years-long program called 'Project Bernanke' that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing ad services. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December.
Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000 contribution from
Andy Bechtolsheim
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. His net worth ...
, co-founder of
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.
[Kopytoff, Verne, Fost, Dan.]
For early Googlers, key word is $$$
". ''San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de ...
.'' April 29, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced, the major investors being rival venture capital firms
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...
and
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...
.
While Google still needed more funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public, despite their financial issues. They were not ready to give up control over Google.
Following the closing of the $25 million financing round, Sequoia encouraged Brin and Page to hire a CEO. Brin and Page ultimately acquiesced and hired
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 20 ...
as Google's first CEO in March 2001.
In October 2003, while discussing a possible
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
of shares (IPO),
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
approached the company about a possible partnership or
merger
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...
. The deal never materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...
and
Goldman Sachs Group
Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, Hong ...
to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.
Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. A total of 19,605,052
shares
In financial markets, a share is a unit of equity ownership in the capital stock of a corporation, and can refer to units of mutual funds, limited partnerships, and real estate investment trusts. Share capital refers to all of the shares of an ...
were offered at a price of $85 per share.
[Elgin, Ben.]
Google: Whiz Kids or Naughty Boys?
" ''Business Week
''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...
.'' August 19, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as
≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a
market capitalization
Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders.
Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...
of more than $23 billion.
[Webb, Cynthia L.]
Google's IPO: Grate Expectations
" ''The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
.'' August 19, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owned 2.7 million shares of Google.
[Kuchinskas, Susan.]
Yahoo and Google Settle
".
internetnews.com
.'' August 9, 2004. Retrieved on February 25, 2007.
Following the company's IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their
base salary be cut to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries were turned down, primarily because their main compensation continues to come from owning stock in Google. Before 2004, Schmidt made $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each received an annual salary of $150,000.
There were concerns that Google's IPO would lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires. As a reply to this concern, co-founders Brin and Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.
The company was listed on the
NASDAQ
The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...
stock exchange under the
ticker symbol
A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. In short, ticker symbols are arrangements of symbols or characters (generally Latin letters ...
GOOG. When Alphabet was created as Google's parent company, it retained Google's stock price history and ticker symbol.
Name
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "
googol
A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, ...
",
[Hanley, Rachael.]
From Googol to Google: Co-founder returns
." ''The Stanford Daily
''The Stanford Daily'' is the student-run, independent daily newspaper serving Stanford University. ''The Daily'' is distributed throughout campus and the surrounding community of Palo Alto, California, United States. It has published since the U ...
.'' February 12, 2003. Retrieved on August 26, 2010. which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their first paper on
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
:
"We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10
100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."
There are uses of the name going back at least as far as the creation of the
comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...
character
Barney Google
''Barney Google and Snuffy Smith'', originally ''Take Barney Google, F'rinstance'', is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. Since its debut on June 17, 1919, the strip has gained a large international readership, appea ...
in 1919. British children's author
Enid Blyton
Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer, whose books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Her books are still enormously popular and have be ...
used the phrase "Google Bun" in ''
The Magic Faraway Tree'' (published 1941) and ''
The Folk of the Faraway Tree'' (published 1946), and called a clown character "Google" in ''
Circus Days Again'' (published 1942). There is also the
Googleplex Star Thinker from
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author and screenwriter, best known for ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' developed into a " ...
' ''
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comic science fiction, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally The Hitchhiker's Guide to th ...
''. In March 1996, a business called Groove Track Productions applied for a United States trademark for "Google" for various products including several categories of clothing, stuffed toys, board games, and candy. The firm abandoned its application in July 1997.
Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "
google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
" was added to the ''
Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' and the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...
'' in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." The use of the term itself reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
The first use of "Google" as a verb in
pop culture
Pop or POP may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Pop music, a musical genre Artists
* POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade
* Pop!, a UK pop group
* Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band
Albums
* Pop (Gas al ...
happened on the TV series ''
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' is an American supernatural fiction, supernatural drama television series created by writer and director Joss Whedon. It is based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film), 1992 film of the same name, also written by W ...
'', in 2002. In November 2009, the
Global Language Monitor
The Global Language Monitor (GLM) is a company based in Austin, Texas that collectively documents, analyzes, and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, with a particular emphasis upon the English language. It is particularly known for its ...
named "Google" No. 7 on its Top Words of the Decade list. In December 2009 the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...
highlighted Google in their "Portrait of the Decade (Words)" series. In May 2012, David Elliott filed a complaint against Google, Inc. claiming that Google's once distinctive mark GOOGLE® has become generic and lacks trademark significance due to its common use as a transitive verb. After losing to Google in
UDRP The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) is a process established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the resolution of disputes regarding the registration of internet domain names. The UDRP curren ...
proceedings involving many "Google-related" domain name registrations that he owns, Elliott later sought a declaratory judgment that his domain names are rightfully his, that they do not infringe any trademark rights Google may own, and that all Google's registered GOOGLE® marks should be cancelled since "Google" is now a common generic word worldwide that means "to search the Internet."
Partnerships
Google has worked with several corporations, in order to improve production and services.
On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a R&D center at NASA's
Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
. NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing,
bio-
info
Info is shorthand for "information". It may also refer to:
Computing
* .info, a generic top-level domain
* info:, a URI scheme for information assets with identifiers in public namespaces
* info (Unix), a command used to view documentation produc ...
-
nano convergence, and encouragement of the
entrepreneurial space industry
Private spaceflight is spaceflight or the new product development, development of spaceflight technology that is conducted and paid for by an entity other than a government agency.
In the early decades of the Space Age, the government space ag ...
. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers. In October 2006, Google formed a partnership with
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
office program
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...
.
[Brown, James. . ''vnunet.com.'' October 5, 2005.]
Time Warner
Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States.
It was originally established in 1972 by ...
's
AOL
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017 ...
unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a US$1 billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL. As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on
video search A video search engine is a web-based search engine which Web crawler, crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers. Some engines ...
and offer AOL's premium video service within
Google Video
Google Video was a free video hosting service launched by the multinational technology company Google on January 25, 2005. Similar to YouTube, this platform allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on to other websites ...
. This did not allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also increase.
In August 2006, Google signed a $900 million offer with
News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on
MySpace and other News Corp. websites including
IGN
''IGN'' (formerly ''Imagine Games Network'') is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa distri ...
,
AmericanIdol.com,
Fox.com
The Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly known simply as Fox and stylized in all caps as FOX, is an American commercial broadcast television network owned by Fox Corporation and headquartered in New York City, with master control operations and ...
, and
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, although
Fox Sports
Fox Sports is the brand name for a number of sports channels, broadcast divisions, programming, and other media around the world.
The ''Fox Sports'' name has since been used for other sports media assets. These assets are held mainly by the Fo ...
is not included as a deal already exists between News Corp. and
MSN
MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95.
The Microsoft Net ...
.
On December 6, 2006,
British Sky Broadcasting
Sky UK Limited is a British broadcaster and telecommunications company that provides television and broadband Internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom. It is a subsidiary of ...
released details of a Sky and Google alliance. This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com".
In 2007, Google displaced
America Online
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...
as a key partner and sponsor of the
NORAD Tracks Santa
NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed program in which North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) simulates the tracking of Santa Claus, who is said to leave the North Pole to travel around the world on his mission to deliver p ...
program.
Google Earth
Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...
was used for the first time to give visitors to the website the impression that they were following
Santa Claus
Santa Claus, also known as Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, or simply Santa, is a Legend, legendary figure originating in Western Christianity, Western Christian culture who is said to Christmas gift-bringer, bring ...
' progress in
3-D.
The program also made its presence known on
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
in 2007 as part of its partnership with Google.
In 2008, Google developed a partnership with
GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from
Vandenberg Air Force Base Vandenberg may refer to:
* Vandenberg (surname), including a list of people with the name
* USS General Harry Taylor (AP-145), USNS ''General Hoyt S. Vandenberg'' (T-AGM-10), transport ship in the United States Navy, sank as an artificial reef in K ...
on September 6, 2008. Google also announced in 2008 that it was hosting an archive of ''
Life Magazine
''Life'' was an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, ''Life'' was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest ma ...
''s photographs.
In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the
Pontifical Council for Social Communications
The Pontifical Council for Social Communications ( la, Pontificium Consilium de Communicationibus Socialibus) was a dicastery of the Roman Curia that was suppressed in March 2016 and merged into the Secretariat for Communications (now "Dicaste ...
, allowing the
Pope
The pope ( la, papa, from el, πάππας, translit=pappas, 'father'), also known as supreme pontiff ( or ), Roman pontiff () or sovereign pontiff, is the bishop of Rome (or historically the patriarch of Rome), head of the worldwide Cathol ...
to have his own channel on
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
.
In January 2013, Google announced a partnership with
Kia Motors
Kia Corporation, commonly known as Kia (, ; formerly known as Kyungsung Precision Industry and Kia Motors Corporation), is a South Korean multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. It is South Korea's second lar ...
and
Hyundai Hyundai is a South Korean industrial conglomerate ("chaebol"), which was restructured into the following groups:
* Hyundai Group, parts of the former conglomerate which have not been divested
** Hyundai Mobis, Korean car parts company
** Hyundai ...
. The partnership integrates Google Maps and Place into new car models to be released later in 2013.
The
Alliance for Affordable Internet
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) is an initiative to make the Internet more affordable to people around the world. The World Wide Web Foundation serves as the Secretariat, and major members of coalition include Google, the Omidyar Netwo ...
(A4AI) was launched in October 2013; Google is part of the coalition of public and private organizations that also includes
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
,
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
, and
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
. Led by
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Research fellow, Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxf ...
, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
On September 21, 2017,
HTC
HTC Corporation ( zh, t=宏達國際電子股份有限公司, s=宏达国际电子股份有限公司, p=Hóngdá Guójì Diànzǐ Gǔfèn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī, first=t) or High Tech Computer Corporation, (literally ''Hongda International Electron ...
announced a "cooperation agreement" in which it would sell non-exclusive rights to certain intellectual property, as well as smartphone talent, to Google for $1.1 billion.
See also
*
Timeline of Google Search
Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2014, with over four billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.
For a history of Google the co ...
*
Criticism of Google
Criticism of Google includes concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US militar ...
*
Google logo
The Google logo appears in numerous settings to identify the search engine company. Google has used several logo, logos over History of Google, its history, with the first logo created by Sergey Brin using GIMP. A revised logo debuted on Septemb ...
*
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unt ...
*
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was the ...
*
List of Google's hoaxes and easter eggs
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby union ...
*
Timeline of Mountain View, California
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Mountain View, California, USA.
Prior to 20th century
* The Ohlone tribe inhabited the area, the Tamyen (Tamien, Thamien) people are associated with the Mountain View area.
* 1777 - Mi ...
, headquarters of Google since 1999
References
Further reading
*
Auletta, Ken. ''Googled: The End of the World as We Know It''. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
*
Battelle, John. ''The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture''. New York: Portfolio. (September 2005) .
*Stross, Randall
''Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know'' New York : Free Press, September 2008.
External links
*David Hart
On the Origins of GoogleNational Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
, August 17, 2004
{{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Google
History of Silicon Valley
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...