Google

It was the year 1990 something and the year of the internet was upon us and with thousands and thousands of websites out there. How would you find the website you are looking for. Well, that is the brilliance of this next invention.

History

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph.D. students at Stanford University where they had a research project about search engines.  Where other search engines ranked results based on counting how many times search words or terms appeared on a page. The research was based on the number of pages and the importance of pages of the original site.  This was referred to as PageRank.

They registered the domain name on September 15, 1997, and they incorporated on September 4, 1998.

Money

They raised about $1,000,000 dollars from the following:

• Andy Bechtolsheim (Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems given money before it was incorporated. ($100,000))
• Jeff Bezos
  • Founder of Amazon
• David Cheriton
  • Stanford University computer professor
• Ram Shriram
  • Entrepreneur

And some friends helped them open up their original shop in Menlo Park, CA.

They got some other funding about $25 million.  Over time they moved into the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

They launched a public IPO on Aug. 4, 2004, and the stock was sold at $85. They offered 19,605,052 shares and they raised about $1.67 billion and made the market value of Google around $23 Billion.

Search Engine

It is the most popular word in the world and was added to the Webster Dictionary and it indexes billions of web pages in 11 data centers around the world with 1,000’s of servers handling over 3 billion searches per day. Yes, 3 billion per day, and that was in 2011.

Google Products

Google is owned by a company called Alphabet and they have a number of products which consist of the following:

• Gmail
• Google Maps
• Google Calendar
• Google Drive
• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• Google Slides
• YouTube
• Google My Business
• Android OS 
• Smartwatch
• Television
• Car
• Google Fiber
• Chrome web browser
• Chrome OS

Seems like this list can go on forever.

Overview

Google is a major player in the world and it all came about from an idea two people had. It is now the most popular name in the world and is the most commonly used search engine. Google made over $350 billion back in 2011 and it continues to grow.

I only wish I would have thought of it.