Founded by a couple of graduate students at the Computer Science Dept of Stanford University. In 1996 they set up BackRub, named for its ability to analyze the 'back links' pointing to a website. Being short of money they relied heavily on low-end PCs to build the server, but its reputation as a new way of searching for sites spread quickly around campus. They changed its name to Google, based on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.Following lukewarm interest from the major portal services to buy it, and after advice from Yahoo's founder, they decided to start their own search engine company. They put their Ph.Ds on hold and took their business plan to Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystems and friend of a faculty member.
Pushed for time and barely looking at their demo, he could see the potential and wrote a cheque for $100,000. Raising further investment funds totalling $1 million, they set up a corporation and opened the first office in a friend's garage.
By now Google was handling 10,000 search queries a day and getting press notices. PC Magazine put it into its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Rapid expansion to 500,000 queries per day and an increase in staff saw them moving to premises in Palo Alto.
Venture capital firms began pouring millions of dollars into the company and the boardroom filled up with directors who had helped Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Amazon and Yahoo. Again the company outgrew the office space and moved into Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
Italy's Virgilio and UK's Virgin Net became clients, and AOL/Netscape's choice of Google brought traffic to 3 million searches per day. In the summer of 2000 Google and Yahoo! went into a partnership which was racking up 18 million user queries a day.
China's NetEase and NEC Japan's BIGLOBE added Google to their sites. One of their most successful innovations was the Google Toolbar, allowing right-click searching on text within a web page and highlighting keywords in the results.
GOOGLE HISTORY:
http://www.google.com / corporate / history.html
GOOGLE RECENT NEWS:
Feb 20:Google Introduces New Pricing For Popular Self-Service Online Advertising Program. Highly targeted text-based ads complement Google's objective search results.
Google announced the availability of AdWords Select (TM), an updated version of the AdWords self-service advertising system with a number of new enhancements, including cost-per-click (CPC)-based pricing. This dynamic pricing plan enables advertisers to pay only when their ads are clicked on by users. Google's Premium ads will continue to be priced on a CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) basis.
Source:
http://www.google.com / press / pressrel / select.html
UPDATE
GOOGLE BOOM CONTINUES
In 2002, Google became synonymous in the public imagination with Internet search, so much so that readers of Interbrand's BrandChannel.com site voted Google the brand of the year. The search company displaced last year's winner, Apple, and outperformed global brands, Coke and Starbucks.
Google has built a powerful brand while foregoing on television ads and continues to be the most popular search engine worldwide.
Source:http://siliconvalley.internet.com / news / article.php / 1582431
February 2003 GOOGLE CASTS ITS NETS WIDE
Industry watchers are keenly awaiting comment by Google on the purchase of Pyra Labs and its popular weblogging arm, Blogger.com. Weblogs are personal journals published on the web and are gaining in popularity. Blogger boasts over 1 million users.
The purchase of Pyra Labs comes just a few months after the launch of Google News and signals an aggressive push into content aggregation/publication, which is keeping speculation running high among industry observers. Although it is agreed that the purchase of Blogger is unlikely to bring any great search improvements to Google, it will provide a platform through which Google will be able to distribute highly targeted Google Adwords text ads.
Google's newest service, Content-Targeted Advertising will display text ads on content pages, as well as search pages, of sites including HowStuffWorks, Blogger, and others.
More Info:
www.searchenginewatch.com / sereport / 03 / 02-blogger.html
www.siliconvalley.internet.com / news / article.php / 1585371
www.pandia.com / searchworld / index.html
April 2003 GOOGLE BUYS APPLIED SEMANTICS
Google's announced that it was to acquire Applied Semantics (ASI). Overture denied the takeover would affect their revenues, but the financial community was less certain. Analysts cut ratings on Overture - slicing 27% off Overture's share price in one day.
This article was first published on 01 May 2003 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
