Hey Google, Happy Birthday
On September 27, 2018 Google will celebrate its 20th birthday. Officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it has become the most widely used web-based search engine. What originally began as their PhD thesis at Stanford University, Google has become a multi-million dollar company that employs more than 60,000 employees in 50 different countries.
After developing an algorithm in 1996 to find search results, Page and Brin built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the web. They were able to produce better results than other existing search engines. In 1997 they first made their search engine available on the Stanford network, and then after that to the general public. It was at this point that they realized that they would need more computers, more bandwidth, as well as people to work on the algorithm. After receiving funds from a number of successful entrepreneurs, Google Inc. was formally incorporated on September 7, 1998. By late 1998, with nothing but word of mouth, they were serving more than 10,000 queries per day and had an index of 60 million pages. The name Google is a play on the word "googol" which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Because Googol.com was not available, Google.com became their url.
Their first official office was in Susan Wojcicki and Dennis Troper's garage in Menlo Park, San Francisco. When they outgrew the garage, they moved the company two more times before landing in their current location in Mountain View which has been dubbed "Googleplex". Their initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004 and raised US$1.67 billion and was listed under the ticker symbol GOOG.
To read more about Google, take a look at these books, ebooks and DVDs:
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