Google, one of the world’s most influential companies, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. At that time, it was an online search engine which aimed to extract meaning from the vast data accumulating on the Internet. However, it has grown to offer more than 50 internet services and products such as email, mobile phones, tablet computers, and online document creation. In 2012, Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility enabled the company to sell hardware as well. Along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, Google is one of the four most influential companies in the high-tech marketplace.
Page and Brin met as graduate students at Stanford University and began working on their idea of search technology, which they called BackRub. The search function incorporated the number of links each web site had, with the heavily-linked site placed higher on the list of possibilities. They incorporated the financing of about $1 million from investors, family, and friends in mid-1998 and set up Google in Menlo Park, California, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, “googol.” In 1999, Google was processing 500,000 queries per day, and the activity exploded when it became the client search engine for Yahoo! in 2000. By 2004, users were searching on Google 200 million times a day. The company’s name entered the lexicon as a verb meaning “to google,” which became a common expression for searching the internet.
To accommodate the mass of data, Google built 11 data centres around the world, each containing several hundred thousand servers, with the interlinked computers numbering several million. The heart of Google’s operation is built around three proprietary pieces of computer code: Google File System (GFS), Bigtable, and MapReduce. GFS handles the storage of data, Bigtable is the company’s database program, and MapReduce is used by Google to generate higher-level data.
The company’s growth led to internal management problems, which led to Eric Schmidt becoming the chairman and CEO of the company in 2001, with Page serving as president of products and Brin as president of technology. The IPO of Google in 2004 raised $1.66 billion for the company and made Brin and Page instant billionaires. The stock offering also created 7 billionaires and 900 millionaires from the early stockholders. Google was added to Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) stock index in 2006, and by 2012, its market capitalization made it one of the largest American companies not in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Google reorganized itself in 2015 to become a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc., with Sundar Pichai becoming Google’s new CEO. Alphabet reorganized again in 2017, but Google remains as a top internet search engine and provider of internet services, maps, apps, and YouTube, among others. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top influential companies in the high-tech marketplace. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success, earning almost all of Alphabet’s revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests in 2016. The company’s founders, Page and Brin, have since stepped down from their positions, but their creation remains one of the world’s most powerful companies that revolutionized the way we use the internet.
