Google:
Search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics are the main areas of interest for Google LLC, an American multinational technology firm. Due to its market domination, data collecting, and technical advantages in the field of artificial intelligence, it has been called "the most powerful firm in the world" and one of the most valuable brands in the world. Along with Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Apple, its parent firm Alphabet is regarded as one of the Big Five American technological corporations.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were pursuing their doctorates at Stanford University in California on September 4, 1998, Google was created. Together, they possess around 14% of their publicly traded shares and, via super-voting stock, 56% of their shareholder voting power. In 2004, the business had its first public offering (IPO). Google underwent a reorganization in 2015 and became an Alphabet Inc. fully owned subsidiary. Google, Alphabet's main business, serves as a holding corporation for all of Alphabet's online assets. On October 24, 2015, Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google, succeeding Larry Page, who was named CEO of Alphabet. Pichai was appointed CEO of Alphabet on December 3, 2019, as well.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were pursuing their doctorates at Stanford University in California on September 4, 1998, Google was created. Together, they possess around 14% of their publicly traded shares and, via super-voting stock, 56% of their shareholder voting power. In 2004, the business had its first public offering (IPO). Google underwent a reorganization in 2015 and became an Alphabet Inc. fully owned subsidiary. Google, Alphabet's main business, serves as a holding corporation for all of Alphabet's online assets. On October 24, 2015, Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google, succeeding Larry Page, who was named CEO of Alphabet. Pichai was appointed CEO of Alphabet on December 3, 2019, as well.
Since then, the business has expanded quickly to provide a wide range of services and products in addition to Google Search, many of which command significant market share. Several different use cases are addressed by these products, such as email (Gmail), navigation (Waze & Maps), cloud computing (Cloud), web browsing (Chrome), video sharing (YouTube), productivity (Workspace), operating systems (Android), cloud storage (Drive), language translation (Translate), photo storage (Photos), video calling (Meet), smart home (Nest), smartphones (Pixel), wearable technology (Pixel Watch & Fitbit), music streaming ( Gaming (Stadia), Glass, Google+, Reader, Play Music, Nexus, Hangouts, and Inbox by Gmail are just a few of the discontinued Google products.
Google also has projects in quantum computing (Sycamore), self-driving vehicles (Waymo, previously the Google Self-Driving Car Project), smart cities (Sidewalk Labs), transformer models, and other areas outside of Internet services and consumer electronics (Google Brain).
The two most popular websites globally are Google and YouTube, followed by Facebook and Twitter. In terms of market share, Google also leads the globe in terms of a search engine, mapping and navigation app, email service, office suite, video sharing platform, picture and cloud storage service, mobile operating system, web browser, ML framework, and AI virtual assistant provider. Google is rated second by Forbes[18] and fourth by Interbrand on the list of the most valuable brands. It has been under heavy fire for problems including invasion of privacy, misuse of its monopolistic position, tax evasion, censorship, and search neutrality.
Early years:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in January 1996 as a research endeavor while enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University in California. Before Google was formally created as a corporation, Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who built a large portion of the code for the first Google Search engine, was a part of the project. Hassan later departed to pursue a career in robotics and started the firm Willow Garage in 2006.
While traditional search engines evaluated results by counting the number of times the search phrases appeared on the page, researchers hypothesized a superior approach that looked at the connections between websites. This method, which they termed PageRank, evaluated a website's relevancy based on its number of pages and the weight of the sites that connected to the original site. Hassan started building the code to implement Page's ideas after Page shared his thoughts with him.
The new search engine was initially given the moniker "BackRub" by Page and Brin because it used backlinks to determine a site's relevance. Page and Brin credited Hassan and Alan Steremberg as being essential to the growth of Google. Later, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd collaborated with Page and Brin to write the first project paper, explaining PageRank and the early Google search engine prototype, which was published in 1998. The project also listed Jeff Ullman and Héctor Garca-Molina as collaborators. A comparable page-ranking and site-scoring system called RankDex, created by Robin Li in 1996 and referenced in Larry Page's PageRank patent, had an effect on PageRank. I eventually went on to find the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the search engine's name was a pun on the term googol, which is a very huge number expressed as 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros). This was done to indicate that the search engine was designed to offer vast amounts of information.
1998's Google homepage
Because the company's founders had no background in HTML, the markup language used to create websites, Google's first homepage featured a straightforward layout.
On September 15, 1997,[39] the domain name www.google.com was registered, and on September 4, 1998, the business was formed. Its headquarters were in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. The first employee was Craig Silverstein, a Stanford Ph.D. student who was also employed.
A few weeks before Google was formally established on September 7, 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000 in the company in August 1998. To be able to utilize the money from this first investment, the firm had to be incorporated. Because David Cheriton worked close by at Stanford and they were aware of his startup expertise thanks to the recent $220 million sale of the business he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco, Page, and Brin first turned to him for assistance. David set up a meeting between Page, Brin, and Andy Bechtolsheim, another co-founder of Granite. Because Andy had another meeting at Cisco, where he now worked after the purchase, at 9 AM, the meeting, which was scheduled for 8 AM on the front porch of David's Palo Alto house, had to be quick. Andy looked at a website demo for a while, decided he liked what he saw, and then returned to his vehicle to get the check. Later, David Cheriton contributed $250,000 to the cause.
In 1998, entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos both contributed money to Google.
[46] Shriram, a venture investor, had been contacted by Page and Brin for finance and advice. In February 1998, Shriram made a $250,000 investment in Google. Because Amazon had purchased Junglee, where Shriram served as president, Bezos was a person whom Shriram knew. Shriram introduced Bezos to Google. Six months after Shriram made his investment, Bezos urged Shriram to see Google's founders when he and his wife were on vacation in the Bay Area. They eventually met. The original round of fundraising for Google had already officially ended, but Bezos' position as Amazon's CEO was enough to convince Page and Brin to extend it and accept his contribution.
Google collected around $1,000,000 from these early backers, including friends and family, enabling them to set up a company in Menlo Park, California.
A fresh $25 million round of financing was announced on June 7, 1999, with prominent investors including the venture capital companies Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. This followed some further, smaller investments from the end of 1998 to the beginning of 1999[46].
Both companies were originally hesitant to invest in Google together because they each wanted to hold onto a bigger portion of the company's power. However, Larry and Sergey insisted on accepting investments from each. Due to their trust in Google's huge potential and the facilitation of prior angel investors Ron Conway and Ram Shriram who had ties in the venture businesses, both venture companies ultimately decided to invest jointly $12.5 million each.
Growth:
Several well-known Silicon Valley technological start-ups have their headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where the firm relocated its operations in March 1999. Despite Page and Brin's initial objections to an advertisement-supported search engine, Google started selling ads for search terms the next year. Ads were only text-based to preserve a clean website design. It was announced in June 2000 that Google will replace Inktomi as the main search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most well-known websites at the time.
There was a lot of exposed wire and circuit boards on Google's original servers.
first operational server from Google
After outgrowing its first two sites, the business leased an office building from Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in 2003. The complex was given the name "Googleplex," a pun on the term "googolplex," which consists of the number one and a googol zero. Three years later, Google paid $319 million to SGI to acquire the land. By that point, the word "Google" had entered common use and was defined as "to use the Google search engine to get information on the Internet" in both the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. In a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode from October 2002, the verb was first used on television.
Additionally, in 2001, Google's investors decided to choose Eric Schmidt as the company's chairman and CEO because they recognized the need of having excellent internal management. John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins suggested Eric. For many months, he had been looking for a CEO that Sergey and Larry would approve, but they had turned down several applicants because they wanted to maintain control of the business. At one point, Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz threatened to demand that Google immediately repay Sequoia's $12.5 million investment if they did not carry out the verbal commitment they had made during investment discussions to appoint a chief executive officer. Because the company's potential hadn't yet been publicly acknowledged and because he was preoccupied with his duties as CEO of Novell, Eric was originally hesitant to join Google as well. As a condition of joining, Eric consented to purchase $1 million worth of Google preferred shares as a sign of his dedication and to help the company with funding.
