Google's corporate history page has a pretty strong background on Google, starting from when Larry met Sergey at Stanford right up to present day. In 1995 Larry Page met Sergey Brin at Stanford. By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the
"back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of
Lego™ bricks, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines.
Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network. A year later, their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen it. Buzz about the new search technology began to build as word spread around campus. BackRub ranked pages using citation notation, a concept which is popular in academic circles.
If someone cites a source they usually think it is important. On the web, links act as citations. In the PageRank algorithm links count as votes, but some votes count more than others. Your ability to rank and the strength of your ability to vote for others depends upon your authority: how many people link to you and how trustworthy those links are. In 1998, Google was launched. Sergey tried to shop their PageRank technology, but nobody was interested in buying or licensing their search technology at that time.
Winning the Search War
Later that year Andy Bechtolsheim gave them $100,000 seed funding, and Google received $25 million Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers the following year. In 1999 AOL selected Google as a search partner, and Yahoo! followed suit a year later. In 2000 Google also launched their popular Google Toolbar. Google gained search market share year over year ever since. In 2000 Google relaunched their AdWords program to sell ads on a CPM basis.
In 2002 they retooled the service, selling ads in an auction which would factor in bid price and ad clickthrough rate. On May 1, 2002, AOL announced they would use Google to deliver their search related ads, which was a strong turning point in Google's battle against Overture. In 2003 Google also launched their AdSense program, which allowed them to expand their ad network by selling targeted ads on other websites.
Going Public
Google used a two class stock structure, decided not to give earnings guidance, and offered shares of their stock in a Dutch auction. They received virtually limitless negative press for the perceived hubris they expressed in their "AN OWNER'S MANUAL" FOR GOOGLE'S SHAREHOLDERS. After some controversy surrounding an interview in Playboy, Google dropped their IPO offer range from $85 to $95 per share from $108 to $135. Google went public at $85 a share on August 19, 2004 and its first trade was at 11:56 am ET at $100.01.
Verticals Galore!
In addition to running the world's most popular search service, Google also runs a large number of vertical search services, including:
- Google News: Google News launched in beta in September 2002. On September 6, 2006, Google announced an expanded Google News Archive Search that goes back over 200 years.
- Google Book Search: On October 6, 2004, Google launchedGoogle Book Search.
- Google Scholar: On November 18, 2004, Google launched Google Scholar, an academic search program.
- Google Blog Search: On September 14, 2005, Google announced Google Blog Search.
- Google Base: On November 15, 2005, Google announced the launch of Google Base, a database of uploaded information describing online or offline content, products, or services.
- Google Video: On January 6, 2006, Google announced Google Video.
- Google Universal Search: On May 16, 2007 Google began mixing many of their vertical results into their organic search results.
Just Search, We Promise!
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. However that statement includes many things outside of the traditional mindset of search, and Google maintains that ads are a type of information. This other information includes:
- Email: Google launched Gmail on March 31, 2004, offering search email search and gigabytes of storage space.
- Maps: On October 27, 2004, Google bought Keyhole. On February 8, 2005, Google launched Google Maps.
- Analytics: On March 29, 2005, Google bought Urchin, a website traffic analytics company. Google renamed the service Google Analytics.
- Radio ads: Google bought dMarc Broadcasting on January 17, 2006 .
- Ads in other formats: Google tested magazine ads and newspaper ads.
- Office productivity software: on March 9, 2006, Google bought Writely, an online collaborative document creating and editing software product.
- Calendar: on April 14, 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, which allows you to share calendars with multiple editors and include calendars in web pages.
- Checkout: On June 29, 2006, Google launched Google Checkout, a way to store your personal transaction related information online.
Paying for Distribution
In addition to having strong technology and a strong brand Google also pays for a significant portion of their search market share. On December 20, 2005 Google invested $1 billion in AOL to continue their partnership and buy a 5% stake in AOL. In February 2006 Google agreed to pay Dell up to $1 billion for 3 years of toolbar distribution. On August 7, 2006, Google signed a 3 year deal to provide search on MySpace for $900 million. On October 9, 2006 Google bought YouTube, a leading video site, for $1.65 billion in stock. Google also pays Mozilla and Opera hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search provider in their browsers, bundles their Google Toolbar with software from Adobe and Sun Microsystems, and pays AdSense ad publishers $1 for Firefox + Google Toolbar installs, or up to $2 for Google Pack installs.
Google also builds brand exposure by placing Ads by Google on their AdSense ads and providing Google Checkout to commercial websites. Google Pack is a package of useful software including a Google Toolbar and software from many other companies. At the same time Google helps ensure its toolbar is considered good and its competitors don't use sleazy distribution techniques by sponsoring StopBadware.org. Google's distribution, vertical search products, and other portal elements give it a key advantage in best understanding our needs and wants by giving them the largest Database of Intentions.
Editorial Partnerships
They have moved away from a pure algorithmic approach to a hybrid editorial approach. In April of 2007, Google started mixing recent news results in their organic search results. After Google bought YouTube they started mixing videos directly in Google search results.
Webmaster Communication
Since the Florida update in 2003 Google has looked much deeper into linguistics and link filtering. Google's search results are generally the hardest search results for the average webmaster to manipulate. Matt Cutts, Google's lead engineer in charge of search quality, regularly blogs about SEO and search. Google also has an official blog and has blogs specific to many of their vertical search products. On November 10, 2004, Google opened up their Google Advertising Professional program.
Google also helps webmasters understand how Google is indexing their site via Google Webmaster Central. Google continues to add features and data to their webmaster console for registered webmasters while obfuscating publicly available data. For an informal look at what working at Google looked like from the inside from 1999 to 2005 you might want to try Xooglers, a blog by former Google brand manager Doug Edwards.
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Wikipedia
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