Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who met while attending Stanford University as graduate students studying computer science. In January 1996, they began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, named for its ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Initially, Larry and Sergey were not interested in starting their own search company, but rather licensing the technology to a third party. They approached the major Internet portals, but none were interested.
Taking a recommendation from Yahoo! founder David Filo that they should start their own search company, Larry and Segey set out to acquire seed money. They first approached Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystem, who wrote them a check for $100K. They eventually raised nearly $1MM dollars, and in September 1998, Google, Inc. was formed.
Building A Company
On June 7, 1999 Google announced a first round of funding that included $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This funding provided the much needed capital to hire key employees Omid Kordestani from Netscape as VP of Business Development and Urs Hölzle as VP of engineering. It also gave them the funding to find larger office space to house their growing staff, and in August 1999, they moved in to their current headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google also landed its first major distribution partner, AOL/Netscape, which helped put their search queries past 3 million a day. On September 21, 1999 Google removed the beta label from the site.
2000 marked a year of greater distribution and recognition for Google. In May 2000, Google won a Webby and People's Voice Award for technical achievement and later that year, Google wins WIRED Readers Raves Award. On June 26, Google announced a partnership with Yahoo! to be their default search engine provider. Netscape also renews their search partnership.
A few months later on October 23, Google launches their self-service advertising program, Adwords. Towards the end of 2000, Google launches their search toolbar, enabling users to search from anywhere on the web. Google was now handling 100 million search queries per day.
Google Goes Global
Google spent the first half of 2001 expanding their search reach into the mobile and global markets. Wireless Internet users in Asia, Japanese users of i-mode mobile phones, Sprint PCS, Cingular, and AT&T Wireless customers, and other wireless device users throughout the world gained access to the 1.6 billion web documents in Google's growing index. On the global front, Google inked a deal with Universo Online (UOL) to power their search, expanding their reach into Latin America. An agreement with Lycos Korea brought Google search to a new group of Asian Internet users. Google opened sales offices in Hamburg and Tokyo to service international interest in Google's advertising programs. By the end of 2001, users could limit searches to sites written in 26 languages other than English. 2001 was also the year in which Google reached profitability and hired their current CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt, whose career included stints as CEO at Novell Inc. and CTO of Sun Microsystems.
Innovation
Google continued to innovate by releasing new products and services, as well as enhancing existing ones. In February 2002, they introduced Google Search Appliance, which enabled businesses and organizations to use Google search technology to power their intranet search. Also in February, Google switched their Adwords advertising program to a CPC bid model, which proved to be very successful for both businesses as well as for Google's financials. Google also introduced their Web services, releasing a set of APIs which allowed web developers to innovate on top of the Google platform by directly quering their seach database.
In September 2002, Google launched Google news in beta. Google news uses a computer program to cull latest news story from around the world and posts the headline, photo, and a snippet summary of the news article. The page is continuously updated, and lets users scan, search, and browse, with links from each headline to the original story.
In December 2002, Google launched Froogle in test mode. Froogle allows users to search for products available from thousands of merchants around the web.
I've been using google search for years and they have the best results of any other search engine. I also like their gmail service and the unlimited storage. Microsoft has their work cut out for them!
