GOOGLE AND HISTORY

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in internet-related products and services. This include online advertising and technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from adwords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.

Google was founded by Larry page and Sergey Brin while they were ph.D students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 16 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock.  They incorporated google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was ‘’to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’’ and its unofficial slogan was ‘’Don’t be evil’’. In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in mountain view, California, nicknamed Googleplex.

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), a cloud computing storage service (Google Drive), an office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome Os for a notebook known as chrome book. Google has moved increasingly to communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its ‘’high quality or low- cost’’ Nexus devices and acquired Motorola mobility in 2012. In 2012 a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas city to facilitate a Google fiber broadband service. The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007).

It processes over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa listed google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous google site in other languages figure in the top one hundred as do several other google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such as search neutrality, copy- right, censorship, and privacy.

Google began in January 1996 as a search project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationship between websites. They called this new technology Page Rank, it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. A small search called ‘’Rank Dex’’ from IDD information services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in Rank Dex was patented in july 1999 and used later when Li founded  Baidu in China.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine ‘’Back Rub’’, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to google, originating from a misspelling of the word ‘’googol’’, the number one followed by hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Originally, google ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.

The domain name for google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend Susan ( Wojcicki ) in Menlo park, California. Craig silvastein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee. In may 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from may 2010  (931 million). In January 2013, google announced it had earned US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year 2012. This marked the first time the company has reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of US$38 billion.

The company has reported fourth quarter (Dec. 2014)  earnings per share (EPS) of $6.88-$0.20 under projections. Revenue came in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year) also under expectation by $110 million.