Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful, and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition to many other products. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.
The search engine has gone through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization.
The name Google is a misspelling of 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.
BackRub Google has its origins in BackRub, a research project started in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California."Our history in Depth " Google, Retrieved on March 29, 2016 The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", lead programmer Scott Hassan, who left before Google was officially founded as a company.
While finding a topic for his doctoral thesis in 1995, Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web by understanding its link structure as a huge graph.Battelle, John (August 2005). "The Birth of Google." Received August 16, 2025. ." Wired. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"The best advice I ever got (Fortune, April 2008)). Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, comparing the importance of tracking such backlinks to the role of citations in academic publishing. Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas.
The research project was nicknamed BackRub, and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco. Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP), whose goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library". The SDLP was funded through U.S. federal agencies including the National Science Foundation.The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, Award Abstract #9411306, September 1, 1994 through August 31, 1999 (Estimated), award amount $521,111,001 Brin and Page also received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the improvement of intelligence databases on the disorganized World Wide Web.
Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point. Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm to convert the backlink data they gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance. The pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing search engines, which ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page.Page, Lawrence, Brin, Sergey, Motwani, Rajeev, Winograd, Terry. "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web ." November 11, 1999.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies and laid the foundation for their search engine.Google I/O Conference is a big upcoming in 2015.Downloaded 11 – February 2009 . Google IO Conferences. Retrieved on February 22, 2015 The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website and used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.
Scott Hassan and 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. Larry Page's patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li's earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2000."About: RankDex" , RankDex
Beta Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.
In April of 1998, Brin and Page published "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", (ALSHWSE), in which they detailed (in Section 2) the core of the algorithm: PageRank, Anchor text, as well as more classic information retrieval techniques. Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, stating (in Appendix A) that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers". Note, they changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.Stross, Randall, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know , New York : Free Press, September 2008. Cf. pp.3–4.
In July 1998, Larry Page announced new features "The most significant is a summary for each result that highlights where your query matched,". Google was the first web search engine to use such query focused summaries. Research showing their value was presented in Stanford in March '98AAAI 1998 Spring Symposium on Intelligent Text Summarization and later published. The summaries became known as snippets, which Ex Google VP, Hugh Williams, described as "the unsung heroes of web search".
With PageRank, Anchor Text, snippets, and advertising free content, the version of the Google search engine that rapidly became popular was established.
Brin and Page formally incorporated their company, Google, on September 4, 1998, in their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki eventually became an executive at Google and CEO at YouTube. Page invited Craig Nevill-Manning, whom he had met while Nevill-Manning was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, to join Google. Nevill-Manning declined and joined years later.
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.Scott Rosenberg: Yes, there is a better search engine. While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire . Salon.com, 21 December 1998 The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it.
Google moved its offices to 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups,Fried, Ian. "A building blessed with tech success ." CNET. October 4, 2002. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. in March 1999. After outgrowing the University Avenue location and two subsequent locations, the company leased an office complex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The complex became known as the Googleplex. In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.Staff Writer. "Google to buy headquarters building from Silicon Graphics ." Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal. June 16, 2006. Retrieved on February 24, 2007.
Advertising business
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.Thompson, Bill. "Is Google good for you? " BBC News. December 19, 2003. Retrieved on February 25, 2007. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off created by Bill Gross. When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later buy AltaVista, a predecessor search engine to Google, before being bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court; Google agreed to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.Sullivan, Danny. "GoTo Going Strong ." The Search Engine Report. July 1, 1998.Pelline, Jeff. "Pay-for-placement gets another shot ." CNET. February 19, 1998.Glaser, Ken. "Who Will GoTo.com?" OnlinePress.com . February 20, 1998. While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.
Google declared a code of conduct "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004 IPO, noting that "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of the Blogger website. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine Google News.
In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some market share, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness. The verb "to google" has entered a number of languages (first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a genericized trademark).