Everyone knows the name Google. Whether young or old, computer smart or not this name will pop up in any conversation about computers. Google has created some very impressive milestones of its time and continues to grow rapidly every day. It all started when Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in Stanford. Larry was 22 and a graduate of University of Michigan was there considering attending the school. And low and behold Sergey, who was 21, was there to show him around. Talk about a match made in heaven!
However, according to some they disagreed on just about everything during their first meeting. In 1996, now firm friends and both of them computer science grad students, began developing a search engine called BackRub. This search engine had operated on Stanford servers for just a little over a year when it started taking up to much bandwidth to suite Stanford. So they decided to switch servers and renamed the search engine in 1997, calling it Google. The name comes from a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zero’s. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
In august of 2008, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes them a check for $100,000 to a company that didn’t even exist yet. It was at this very moment that they realized what they had and went and incorporated the name Google Inc. Their knowledge was great, but not great enough to impress the money boys or the major internet portals. Oh how they wish they invested in them now! So they began struggling for financial support. Andy was one of the few to see true potential of what these boys had created. During their presentation to him, Andy said he had to duck out for another meeting and offered to write them a check. The check was for $100,000 and that indeed had got things moving for them.
In September the boys moved into the their workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, CA. They then went on to file for incorporation in California on September 4 1998. Shortly after completing this important task, the boys went an opened a bank account in the name of Google Inc., their newly established company, and deposited the $100,000 dollar check Andy Bechtolsheim had given them. Shortly after they have established there new business they began hiring employees. There first one was Craig Silverstein, a fellow grad student from Stanford as well.
In December of 1998 PC Magazine wrote: “The 25 million pages currently catalogued seem to be good choices. The site has uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results. There’s much more to come from Google, but even in its prototype form it’s a great search engine.” . They went on to say that Google had made its mark as one off the Top 100 websites for 1998. Even at the very beginning they received only the best reviews.
They then went on to become the most successful internet company ever. Early in 1999 they struck a deal with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins for $25 million. In November 1999 Charlie Ayers joined Google as the company’s first chef. In April of 2000. Google announced the MentalPlex program, which envisages the software’s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. In June of 2000, Google partnered with Yahoo! to become their default search provider. Also in June they announced the first billion URL index, making Google become the world’s largest search engine. In September of 2000 they started offering searches in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean , bringing their total number of supported languages to 15. In December 2000 Google toolbar was released.
