How Google Became a Giant

Have you heard of something called “Google“? If you have not, then you might be someone from the past who have used a time machine to come to the future. Google is one of the biggest, powerful and most successful companies in the world. Let’s look into its history to see how it all started and how far has it reached over time.

Some Applications of Google

Google offers services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Duo, Hangouts, Chat, and Meet), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, and Street View), podcast hosting (Google Podcasts), video sharing (YouTube), blog publishing (Blogger), note-taking (Google Keep and Google Jamboard), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos).

The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. Google has moved increasingly into hardware; from 2010 to 2015, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including the Google Pixel smartphone, Google Home smart speaker, Google Wifi mesh wireless router, and Google Daydream virtual reality headset. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier (Google Fiber, Google Fi, and Google Station).

Importance of Google

Google is the most popular search engine in the world today. Apart from the search engine, Google also has many other useful applications. Google apps are found on almost all devices, many of them being pre-installed on your device for you. Chances are that you might be reading this from a search result of a Google search engine. Internet, in general, is becoming more and more essential every day and to the extent to which it will shortly become one of the basic needs of humans. Just as the Internet gains importance so will those who are making the internet usable to the common people.

Today millions of people, even billions, are reliant on Google for navigation, online meetings, contacting others, etc.. Getting information from Google has become vital in recent times with the advancement of technology. We get information about technology, celebrities, countries etc. from Google. It provides email services and countless other services too.

History

Since it is so important to us, let’s get to know a little about Google and how it all began.

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 Stanford, California. The project initially involved an unofficial “third founder”, Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company. This search engine was however very different from conventional search engines at that time, which ranked pages by how many times a term appeared on the page. However, Google developed a better system that analyzed the relationship between different websites. The idea was Larry Page’s and Hassan wrote the code to implement it. They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine “BackRub“, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. (Guess why backlink and guest blogging is important). Hassan, as well as Alan Steremberg, were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page’s PageRank patent including a citation to Li’s earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word “googol” (The number 1 followed by 100 zeros) which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

The domain name www.google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

Google was initially funded by an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; the money was given before Google was incorporated. Google received money from three other investors in 1998: Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram. Between these initial investors, friends, and family, Google raised around $1 million, which is what allowed them to open up their original shop. After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

Rapid Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California. The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin’s initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine. To maintain an uncluttered page design, advertisements were solely text-based. In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.

In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex became known as the Googleplex, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.

Additionally, in 2001 Google’s investors felt the need to have strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the Chairman and CEO of Google.

Google’s initial public offering took place five years later, on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in an online auction format. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.

In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.

In 2005, The Washington Post reported on a 700 percent increase in third-quarter profit for Google, mainly thanks to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. By 2011, Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently.

On August 15, 2011, Google made its largest-ever acquisition to date when it announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola’s considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies, to help protect Google in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies.

The year 2012 was the first time that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, generating $38 billion the previous year. In January 2013, then-CEO Larry Page commented,

“We ended 2012 with a strong quarter… Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year — not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half.”

In June 2013, Google acquired Waze, a $966 million deal. Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson. On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies. On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Stadia.

On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet. Google became Alphabet’s leading subsidiary and will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet’s internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, who became CEO of Alphabet.

As of October 2016, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries. Alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited websites, including YouTube and Blogger.

Internal Downfalls

On August 8, 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he distributed a memo throughout the company which argued that bias and “Google’s ideological echo chamber” clouded their thinking about diversity and inclusion, and that it is also biological factors, not discrimination alone, that causes the average woman to be less interested than men in technical positions. Damore was fired on the same day.

Between 2018 and 2019, tensions between the company’s leadership and its workers escalated as staff protested company decisions on internal sexual harassment, a censored Chinese search engine, and a military drone artificial intelligence, which had been seen as areas of revenue growth for the company. On November 1, 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walk-out to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints. Later in 2019, some workers accused the company of retaliating against internal activists.

On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for antitrust violations. This led to the filing of an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020, on the grounds the company had abused a monopoly position in the search and search advertising markets.

Conclusion

As we can see Google has grown very rapidly over time and is now facing problems too. However, no one can deny the success of Google and its valuable contribution to our daily lives.

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