The American search engine firm Google, officially known as Google LLC and formerly known as Google Inc. (1998-2017), was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and is a division of parent company Alphabet Inc.
Google focuses on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Google is in charge of more than 70% of all global online search queries, making it central to the experience of the majority of Internet users. The company's main office is in Mountain View, California.
How Google Was Created
As PhD candidates at Stanford in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began collaborating on a search engine known as BackRub. In which, Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google. Over the next few years, Google drew the attention of not only academics, but also Silicon Valley investors. Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a $100,000 check in August 1998, and Google Inc. was born.
With this investment, the newly formed team moved from the dorms to their first office: Susan Wojcicki's garage in suburban Menlo Park, California (employee no.16 and now CEO of YouTube).
Google outgrew the garage and eventually moved to its current headquarters (aka'The Googleplex') in Mountain View, California.
Google Struggle
Nonetheless, Page and Bryn came close to selling Google at several points during the 1990s.
Founders couldn’t secure enough funding for company to survive.
According to reports, the Google co-founders approached Yahoo, Excite, and several other Silicon Valley companies about buying the company for $1 million. Fortunately for both of them, as well as for thousands of Google employees and millions of investors today, all of the deals fell through, and Page and Bryn continued to dominate the internet search engine market.
Google Growth
Google made comeback with the introduction of AdWords, its pay-per-click, third-party advertising platform, in 2002, Google truly struck gold. Yahoo had another opportunity to profit from Google when Page and Bryn approached the technology company seeking $3 billion in funding. When Yahoo declined, Google found another way to make money, and Google AdWords has become a massive profit center for Google over the last 16 years.
Soon after, Google launched several other key company initiatives, including Google AdSense (2003), a product that allowed businesses to connect with global advertisers with the click of a button. Gmail, Google's email service, was launched on April Fool's Day in 2004.
More products coming after are Google Maps (2005), YouTube (2005 - but owned yet by Google), Google Earth (2005), Google Calendar (2006), Google Finance (2006), Google Streetview (2007), Google Android (2007), Google Chrome (2008), Google Voice (2009), Google Labs (in 2012). It’s vast of improvement in just one decades.
How Google Got it’s Name And Why That Matters
The name itself has an interesting backstory. The term "Google" is derived from the word "googol" - a term for the number one, followed by 100 zeros. The name is included in the book "Mathematics and the Imagination," which presumably was read and admired by Page and Bryn.
it reflects the founders’ desire to organize the massive amount of information available online.
Google grew in popularity alongside the internet. Because of its performance and distinct method of site ranking, it gradually became the go-to internet search engine. With a name like Google, it was easy for it to become its own full-fledged verb for "search the internet for information."
Domination Of the Culture Of Information Sharing
Google’s name is well known words in pop culture, it’s also good for company because it’s free advertising.
According to Dictionary.com, the term “Google it” means “ an instruction, often humorous, to look up any given question on the leading internet search engine, Google.”
The term "Google" has most likely been around since at least 1998, as Page once wrote on a Google mailing list at the time, "Have fun and keep googling!" Google as a verb had become so useful a few years later that it was nominated for the American Dialect Society's 2002 Word of the Year.