The Google Story

The Google Story : From 2 students to 15000+ team members and a revenue in excess of 11 billion US $





Google is derived from the word googol.It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

The Beginning, 1995-98
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Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. Larry was a 24-year-old University of Michigan alumnus on a weekend visit; Sergey, 23, was among a group of students assigned to show him around. They argued about every topic they discussed. Their strong opinions and divergent viewpoints would eventually find common ground in a unique approach to solving one of computing's biggest challenges: retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data.

By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.A year later, their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen it. Buzz about the new search technology began to build as word spread around campus.Larry and Sergey continued working to perfect their technology Meanwhile Sergey set up a business office, and the two began calling on potential partners who might want to license a search technology better than any then available. Despite the dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building a company of their own around the technology they had developed.

Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. "When it's fully developed and scalable," he told them, "let's talk again." Others were less interested in Google."

Unable to interest the major portal players of the day, Larry and Sergey decided to make a go of it on their own. All they needed was a little cash to move out of the dorm – and to pay off the credit cards they had maxed out buying a terabyte of memory. So they wrote up a business plan, put their Ph.D. plans on hold, and went looking for an angel investor. Their first visit was with a friend of a faculty member.

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems took One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential – a lot of potential.As Sergey tells it, "We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, 'Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?' It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000." It sat in Larry's desk drawer for a couple of weeks while he and Sergey scrambled to set up a corporation and locate other funders among family, friends, and acquaintances. Ultimately they brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million.

In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its office in Menlo Park, California. This office had included a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology.By this time, Google.com was answering 10,000 search queries each day. The press began to take notice of the upstart website with the relevant search results, and articles extolling Google appeared in USA TODAY and Le Monde. That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world.
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1999
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Google Ink by February 1999, moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. At eight employees, the staff had nearly tripled, and the service was answering more than 500,000 queries per day. Interest in the company had grown as well. On June 7, the companysecured a round of funding that included $25 million from the two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a replay of the convergence of opposites that gave birth to Google, the two firms - normally fiercely competitive, but eye-to-eye on the value of this new investment - both took seats on the board of directors. Michael Moritz of Sequoia and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins - who between them had helped grow Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Amazon, and Yahoo! - joined Ram Shriram, CEO of Junglee, at the ping pong table that served as formal boardroom furniture.In short, key hires began to fill the company's modest offices. Omid Kordestani left Netscape to accept a position as vice president of business development and sales, and Urs Hölzle was hired away from UC Santa Barbara as vice president of engineering. It quickly became obvious that more space was needed. AOL/Netscape selected Google as its web search service and helped push traffic levels past 3 million searches per day. What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand.

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2000
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At the Googleplex, a unique company culture was evolving. To maximize the flexibility of the work space, large rubber exercise balls were repurposed as highly mobile office chairs in an open environment free of cubicle walls. Sections of the parking lot were roped off for twice-weekly roller hockey games and so on.The informal atmosphere bred both collegiality and an accelerated exchange of ideas.

The clients began ti sign up to use Google's search technology on their own sites. With the launch of a keyword-targeted advertising program, Google added another revenue stream that began moving the company into the black. By mid-2000, these efforts were beginning to show real results.On June 26, Google and Yahoo! announced a partnership that solidified the company's reputation – not just as a provider of great technology, but as a substantial business answering 18 million user queries every day. In the months that followed, partnership deals were announced on all fronts, with China's leading portal NetEase and NEC's BIGLOBE portal in Japan both adding Google search to their sites.

To extend the power of keyword-targeted advertising to smaller businesses, Google introduced AdWords, a self-service ad program that could be activated online with a credit card in a matter of minutes. And in late 2000, to enhance users' power to search from anywhere on the web, Google introduced the Google Toolbar. The introduction of Google Toolbar proved enormously popular and has since been downloaded by millions of users.As 2000 ended, Google was already handling more than 100 million search queries a day
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2001
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As Google's search capabilities multiplied, the company's financial footing became even more solid. By the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2001, it announced that we had found something that had eluded many other online companies: profitability. Around the world, Google's circle of friends continued to widen. An agreement with Lycos Korea brought Google search to a new group of Asian Internet users. In October, a partnership with Universo Online (UOL) made Google Latin America's premier search engine. New sales offices opened in Hamburg and Tokyo to satisfy growing international interest in Google's advertising programs.

Meanwhile the Google search engine evolved and learned to crawl several new kinds of information. File type search added a dozen formats to Google's roster of searchable documents. In December, Google Image Search, first launched during the summer with 250 million images, came out of beta with advanced search added and an expanded image index. Online shopping took a leap forward with the beta launch of Google Catalog Search, which made it possible for Google users to search and browse more than 1,100 mail order catalogs that previously had been available only in print.
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2002
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In February of 2002, with the introduction of the Google Search Appliance, a plug-and-play search solution in a bright yellow box. Soon it was crawling company intranets, e-commerce sites, and university networks, with organizations from Boeing to the University of Florida powering their searches with "Google in a box." Google's web application programming interfaces (APIs) enabled software programs to query Google directly, drawing on the data in billions of web documents. Their release sparked a flurry of innovation, from Google-based games to new search interfaces.Google Compute, newly added to the Google Toolbar, took advantage of idle cycles on users' computers to help solve computation-intensive scientific problems. The first beneficiary: Folding@home, a non-profit Stanford University research project to analyze the structure of proteins with an eye to improving treatments for a number of illnesses.

In February of 2002, AdWords, a self-service advertising system, received a major overhaul, including a cost-per-click (CPC) pricing model that makes search advertising as cost-effective for small businesses as for large ones. Google's approach to advertising has always followed the same principle that works so well for search: Focus on the user and all else will follow. For ads, this means using keywords to target ad delivery and ranking ads for relevance to the user's query. As a result, ads only reach the people who actually want to see them – an approach that benefits users as well as advertisers

Google News launched in beta in September of 2002, offering access to 4,500 leading news sources from around the world. Headlines and photos are automatically selected and arranged by a computer program which updates the page continuously. The free service lets users scan, search, and browse, with links from each headline to the original story.
Froogle, a product search service launched in test mode in December of 2002, continued Google's emphasis on innovation and objective results. Searching through millions of relevant websites, Froogle helps users find multiple sources for specific products, delivering images and prices for the items sought.
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2003
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Google's innovations continued to reshape not only the world of search, but also the advertising marketplace and the realm of publishing. In 2003, we acquired Pyra Labs and became the home for Blogger, a leading provider of services for those inclined to share their thoughts with the world through online journals (weblogs). Not long thereafter, the Google AdSense program was born, offering web sites of all sizes a way to easily generate revenue through placement of highly targeted ads adjacent to their content.

Google Version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar was released in the Spring and the Google Deskbar joined it in the Fall. The Toolbar's enhancements included a pop-up blocker and form filler, while the Deskbar's location in the Windows Taskbar made it possible to search using Google without even launching a web browser. And there was so much more to find, thanks to several advanced search features, including a calculator, parcel tracking, flight information, VIN numbers and more, all accessible through the familiar Google search box.
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2004
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On February 17 we announced an expanded web index with more than 6 billion items (including the aforementioned 4.28 billion web pages plus 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages).On April 1, we posted plans to open a research facility on the Moon and announced a new web-based mail service called Gmail, which at launch included a gigabyte of free storage for each user. It soon became apparent that Gmail was no joke. The first serious re-examination of web-based email in years, Gmail offered a powerful built in search function, messages grouped by subject line into conversations and enough free storage to hold years' worth of messages. Using AdSense technology, Gmail was designed to deliver relevant ads adjacent to mail messages, giving recipients a way to act on this information.

On July 13, 2 Google announced the acquisition of Picasa, Inc. This Pasadena, Calif.-based digital photo management company helps users to organize, manage and share their digital photos.Google SMS became a new beta offering in October, enabling people who are away from their computers to quickly and easily get instant, accurate answers to queries.

Towards the end of October, Google announced the acquisition of Keyhole Corp., a digital and satellite image mapping company based in our own headquarter town, Mountain View, Calif. The acquisition gave Google users a powerful new search tool to view 3D images across earth, and the ability to tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest.

In December, launches included Google Groups, a new version of the venerable Usenet archive of 1 billion posts on thousands of topics that Google has managed since 2001. The new Google Groups enables users to create and manage their own email groups and discussion lists. And the Google Print program announced agreements with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.
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2005
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The Google Search Appliance added blue Google Mini, a smaller and lower-cost solution for small and medium-sized businesses that want Google quality search for their documents and sites. The latest version of Google Desktop Search rolled out, now with the ability to locate many more file types including PDF and MP3. Another new feature launched in Google Local: Google Maps, a dynamic online mapping feature users in North America use to find location information, navigate through maps, and get directions quickly and easily. Google Maps is distinguished by easy navigation, detailed route directions, and business locations related to the requested query.
Also in 2005, it seemed all the world took notice of blogs and feeds – two important ways to publish quickly and easily, and to subscribe to many timely publication sites. After a year of learning and growing, our own Google Blog runs frequent postings about Google products. And in May we launched AdSense for feeds, a way for every blogger to gain ad revenue by running targeted AdSense ads within the feed. As for Blogger, we continue to develop features, including the ability to post new items and photos from anywhere – even a mobile phone. As midyear beckoned, we announce an option on Google Labs that some people have asked for: a Personalized Homepage on which you can add news headlines from any sources offering feeds, as well as stock quotes, weather, movie showtimes, even driving directions. Some people want their Google in "classic" (plain) form . In mid-September we released Google Blog Search, a tool to help people find lively content as soon as it's live on blogs around the world. And in recognition of our indebtedness to visionaries, we announced the hiring of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf to continue his global Internet thinking on our behalf.

DGoogle Print was also renamed Google Book Search, which may more accurately reflect how people use it. And part of Book Search is our project to scan public domain books, which we hope will make them much more easily accessible to a global audience of readers.As we closed in on the finish of 2005, we launched a music search feature that delivers a mix of information on artists, titles, links to albums, reviews and where to buy information for a wide range of musicians and performers.
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2006
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2006 arrived with a bang: a brand new Google Video store, featuring many titles from numerous content partners, and the ability to view or download them using a new Google Video Player. And filmmakers can set the price and level of copy protection for their productions, giving fans far more variety than ever before.Google Chat connected people through Gmail and Talk, becoming the first service to integrate email and instant messaging within a web browser. An updated version of Google Desktop made it easier for people to find and share information on their own computers. Google Page Creator made it even easier for anybody to design and create web pages quickly and simply.

On the advertising front, AdWords further expanded its access to local businesses. We announced click-to-play Video Ads, followed soon after by a partnership with MTV. Then, to help advertisers better observe and understand their clickstreams and how visitors accessed their websites, we integrated AdWords with Google Analytics. Not long after, we opened Analytics to anybody with a website, regardless of whether they use AdWords.
During 2006, Google Book Search partnered with several more major libraries: the University of California, University of Wisconsin, and University of Virginia, and also our first non-English partnership, with Universidad Complutense de Madrid, to digitize and make searchable millions of pages of books and holdings across these libraries, which of course feature much that is rich with historical and literary value. Google also began to offer a PDF download of books in the public domain, which proved to be a popular option. In related archival news, we added an Archive Search to Google News, so that history no longer seems so distant. Now you can find news stories going back more than 200 years and arranged using a simple timeline.

In the classrooms, Google released Google Apps for Education to help teachers handle their challenges and students succeed on their work both independently and collaboratively. Incorporating Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator, Google Apps for Education helps the process of learning by making it easier to share information and ideas.
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2007
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In January, Google launched Google SketchUp 6, the newest version of the 3D software modeling tool in Google Earth. Other first quarter updates in our geo-sphere: an Australia-specific domain for Google Maps and the ability to see up-to-date traffic info for 30 major U.S. cities on Google Maps. We also updated Google Maps for Mobile to include current traffic information so that you can have details about freeway slowdowns when you need it most – in your car. (But please don't use Google Maps for Mobile while you're actually driving, or you'll contribute to those red lines depicting trouble!) Also, Google Groups got some new features that moved it from a message board forum to an easy-to-build home on the web for people to share and maintain information, and orkut became even more socially useful with its SMS feature.

Now you have the ability to link your Picasa photos and albums to Google Maps or Google Earth. Google Docs & Spreadsheets has a new interface to help you keep your online and shared documents better organized. We're looking forward to bringing you the ability to create and share online presentations as well, so with that goal in mind, we acquired Zenter.
source: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html