Google

Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search,
which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students
at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm at first known as "BackRub" in
1996, with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved
successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in
2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in
2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company
launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and
the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition
to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding
company Alphabet Inc.
The search engine went through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization.
Google has engaged in partnerships with NASA, AOL, Sun Microsystems, News Corporation, Sky
UK, and others. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005.
The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked
to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
History[edit]
Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

The first Google computer at Stanford was housed in custom-made enclosures constructed
from LEGO bricks. [1]
Beginnings[edit]
Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry
Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford,
California.[2] The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the lead
programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before
Google was officially founded as a company;[3][4] Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and
founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[5][6] Craig Nevill-Manning was also invited to join
Google at its formation but declined and then joined a little later on.[7]
In the search of a dissertation theme, Larry Page had been considering among other things
exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a
huge graph.[8] His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Larry
Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[9]) and Larry Page focused on the problem of
finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and
nature of such backlinks was valuable information about that page (with the role
of citations in academic publishing in mind).[8] Larry Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing
the code to implement Larry Page's ideas.[3]
The research project was nicknamed "BackRub", and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported
by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[10] The two had first met in the summer of
1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a
tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco.[8] Both Brin and Page were working on
the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling
technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through
the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.[10][11][12][13] Brin and Page were also
part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive
Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and
the National Security Agency (NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors.[14]
Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page
serving as the only starting point.[8] To convert the backlink data that is gathered for a given web
page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[8] While
analyzing BackRub's output which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by
importance, the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results
than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to
how many times the search term appeared on a page)

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Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search,

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

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