0 WHO INVENTED 'GOOGLE'?

Who Invented Google?

The very popular Google began in January 1996 as a research project by

Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students

at Stanford University in California.

 

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising

through its AdWords program.

Sergey Brin (L) and Larry Page

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.  The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

 

The Name GOOGLE...

Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not
experienced  in HTML, the language for designing web pages.

Eventually, they changed the name from "BackRub" to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros.  To Google's founders the name represents the immense amount of information that a search engine has to sift through.  Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.

Fueled by the rave reviews that BackRub received, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on Google. Operating out of their dorm rooms, the pair built a server network using cheap, used, and borrowed PCs. They maxed their credit cards buying terabytes of disks at discount prices. They tried to license their search engine technology, however, after failing to find anyone that wanted their product at an early stage of development, Page and Brin decided to keep Google, seek more financing, improve the product, and take it to the public themselves.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

On September 21, 1999, Google officially removed the beta (test status) from its title.

 
Google and more...
Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine.  The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy smartphone series', as well as the new Google Chrome OS best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48 and also, since 15 June 2011, on commercial Chromebooks such as the Samsung Series 5 and Acer AC700.

In May 2011, unique visitors of Google surpassed 1 billion mark for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from a year ago with 931 million unique visitors.

It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.  Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in(14) is the most visited site in India, google.co.uk in the U.K, etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube (Alexa:3), Blogger (Alexa:6), and Orkut. Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.



Source(s):  wikipedia, about.com