History of Google

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search

The Google company was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to
market Google Search, which has become the most widely used web-based search engine. Page
and Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm – at first known
as "BackRub" – in 1996. 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, in
addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding
company, Alphabet Inc.
The search engine went through numerous updates in attempts to combat search engine
optimization abuse, provide dynamic updating of results, and make the indexing system rapid and
flexible. Search results started to be personalized in 2005, and later Google
Suggest autocompletion was introduced. From 2007 Universal Search provided all types of content,
not just text content, in search results.
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. Google was involved
in a 2006 legal dispute in the US over a court order to disclose URLs and search strings, and has
been the subject of tax avoidance investigations in the UK.
The name Google is a variant of googol, chosen to suggest very large numbers.

Beginning[edit]
Google began in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both PhD. students
at Stanford University.[2]
In the search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring
the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a
huge graph.[3] His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later
recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[4]) and 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).[3]
In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by
a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[5] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page
had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that
Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[3] 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.[5][6][7][8]
Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page
serving as the only starting point.[3] To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page
into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[3] 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).[3][9]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be
the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their
studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.[10] The first version of Google was released in
August 1996 on the Stanford website. It used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.[11]
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running
Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan
Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also
been very involved and deserves many thanks.
– Larry Page[12]

Late 1990s[edit]
Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The
domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their
company, Google, on September 4, 1998 in their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park,
California. Wojcicki eventually became an executive at Google and is now the CEO at YouTube.
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an
"advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic
while still students. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.[13]
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.[14] The home page was still
marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better
than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically
innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos,
Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-
com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.[14]
In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to
several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.[15] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the
company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.[16] The company has remained at this location ever since, and
the complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a number
that is equal to 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for
US$319 million.[17]

2000s[edit]
The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users,
who liked its simple design.[18] In 2000, Google began selling advertisementsassociated with
search keywords.[2] The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to
maximize page loading speed.[2] Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-
throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click.[2] This model of selling keyword advertising was
pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and
rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).[19][20][21] While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new
Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.[2]
Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in
their prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004 IPO, noting that "We believe strongly that in the long term,
we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good
things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."[22]In 2008, Google launched Knol, their
own equivalent of Wikipedia,[23] which failed four years later.[24]

2010s[edit]
In 2011, the company launched Google+, its fourth foray into social networking, following Google
Buzz (launched 2010, retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, retired by March 1,
2012), and Orkut (launched in 2004, retired in September 2014[25])
As of November 2014, Google operated over 70 offices in more than 41 countries.[26]
In 2015, Google reorganized its interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., with Google as its
leading subsidiary. Google continued to serve as the umbrella for Alphabet's Internet interests.[27][28][29]

Financing and initial public offering[edit]

The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000
contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which
did not yet exist.[30]
On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced;[31] the major
investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia
Capital.[30] While Google still needed more funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were
hesitant to take the company public, despite their financial issues. They were not ready to give up
control over Google.
Following the closing of the $25 million financing round, Sequoia encouraged Brin and Page to hire a
CEO. Brin and Page ultimately acquiesced and hired Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in March
2001.[32]
In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares
(IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger.[33] The deal never
materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs
Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.
Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004.[34] A total of 19,605,052 shares were
offered at a price of $85 per share.[35] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈
1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised
US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[36] Many of
Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also
benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.[37]
The company was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG. When
Alphabet was created as Google's parent company, it retained Google's stock price history and
ticker symbol.
Growth, 2003-2006[edit]

The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and was designed to be
very fault-tolerant

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of the Blogger website . The acquisition
secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve
the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine Google
News.
In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search
engine of its own. This cost Google some market share, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's
own distinctiveness,[citation needed] and today[when?] the verb "to google" has entered a number of languages
(first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to perform a web search" (a possible
indication of "Google" becoming a genericized trademark).[citation needed]

the relationship between Google, Baidu, and Yahoo

After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than
quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of shares outstanding was 172.85 million while the
"free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by insiders). Google has a dual class stock
structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one.
Page said in the prospectus that Google has "a dual class structure that is biased toward stability
and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me."
In June, 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media
companies by stock market value.[38]
On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265
(another mathematical reference as π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The
move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for
"acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets".[39]
On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which
would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) R&D center at NASA's Ames
Research Center, and on December 31, 2005 Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an
expanded partnership—see Partnerships below.
Additionally in 2005, Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and
distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help in
the open source office program OpenOffice.org.[40]
With Google's increased size came more competition from large mainstream technology companies.
One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google.[41] Microsoft had been touting
its Bing search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are
increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online
and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live
Local competes with Google Earth). In addition to an Internet Explorer replacement Google designed
its own Linux-based operating system called Chrome OS to directly compete with Microsoft
Windows. There were also rumors of a Google web browser, fueled much by the fact that Google
was the owner of the domain name"gbrowser.com".[citation needed] These were later proven when Google
released Google Chrome. This corporate feud boiled over into the courts when Kai-Fu Lee, a former
vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by
citing Lee's non-compete contract (he had access to much sensitive information regarding
Microsoft's plans in China). Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on December
22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential.[42]
Click fraud also became a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George
Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this
really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."[43]
While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has experimented with
other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it
had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that
allows companies to advertise on the radio.[44] Google also began an experiment in selling
advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements
in the Chicago Sun-Times.[45]
During the third quarter 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same
thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well
so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look
at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try
to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build."
After months of speculation, Google was added to the Standard & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on
March 31, 2006.[46] Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based
in Houston that had been acquired by ConocoPhillips.[47] The day after the announcement Google's
share price rose by 7%.[48]
Updates and Evolution of Ranking System[edit]
Early Updates[edit]
In its infancy, very little was needed to fully optimize on page content in the eyes of Google.[49] With
an inverse relationship between query position (in the HTML tag hierarchy) and weight, it simply
boiled down to putting one’s important keywords higher on the HTML tag hierarchy.[50] With this
relatively simple algorithm in place, webmasters quickly discovered tricks to vastly boost their SERP
(Search Engine Ranking Position). One of the first instances of deceitful SEO came in the form of
link keyword stuffing under on page content. As a response, Google removed these sites from its
index, a practice it occasionally reverts to as a way of punishing disingenuous webmasters looking to
cheat the system. The seemingly arbitrary changes to Googles PageRank algorithm however, led to
both community outrage (“many declaring the “death of PageRank”) and a noticeable decline in
precision of search results.[51] Google was also constructing its index via a large monthly crawl. Not
only did this lock search results to this one month window, it also meant that results would show
stale content. An update dubbed “Everflux” introduced fresh crawling (daily crawls) to supplement
the larger, primary crawl.[52] Daily crawling added another layer of relevancy (based upon date and
time), to content ranking.[52] The inconsistencies of index versions across data centers during the
early implementation of Everflux panicked webmasters, who saw their SERPs fluctuate wildly from
day to day.

Boston/Cassandra/Dominic (2003)[edit]
Google's “Boston” update in February 2003 saw major algorithmic changes and the promise of
frequent index updates.[53] “Cassandra” marked a much more aggressive attack on shady SEO
techniques like hidden and disguised keyword links, by emphasizing link quality[53] This was taken a
step further in “Dominic”, which sought to analyze the quality of all backlinks to prevent the then
emerging practice of splogging (the practice of creating nonsensical offsite content to boost SERP of
another site).[54] To combat practices like “Googlebombing” (putting irrelevant, often negative anchor
text linking to popular websites) Dominic tinkered with the weighting of anchor text while stringently
scrutinizing back links and internal linking.[55] An exploit where webmasters would link to the same
site using different anchor text (thereby allowing both links to unfairly contribute to sites PageRank)
was addressed by allowing only one site (given duplicate site links with differing anchor text) link to
flow to PageRank.[56]

Fritz/Supplemental Index/Florida (2004)[edit]

Fritz finalized the “Everflux” implementation, meaning Google's index would receive some degree of
updating every day.[53] Daily crawling added another layer of relevancy, (based upon date and time),
to content ranking.[52] The creation of a supplemental index was designed to house content Google
felt didn’t quite fit in its main index (due either to a low PageRank or shady linking
practices).[57] Storing some sites in a separate index that was to be searched only when no good
match was found in the primary index, Google hoped would seamlessly filter out duplicate and
untrustworthy content.[58] Questions about the efficacy of a multi-index system (particularly on
improving recall) arose, and it remains unclear as to whether Google has retained this system.
Google's “Florida” update looked to be the proverbial “nail in the coffin” for SEO abusers. With
Florida, context and relevancy were determined not just by the appearance of keywords, but of
synonyms and supporting vocabulary throughout the page.[59] This sought to eliminate keyword and
inbound anchor text dumping.[60] Features that had long been experimented on, like phrase proximity
and keyword stemming, became official and users were now being penalized for overly using
commercial/popular keywords.[59] With Florida coming down hard on SEO, many webmasters with
commercial presences on the web took a drastic hit. The real estate community in particular, was hit
hard by Florida’s changes to Google rankings. In its attempt at wide spread reform, the quality of
results took a hit and many site owners felt they took undeserved drops.
Personalized Search (2005)[edit]
To create seamless personalization of search (beyond manual filtering) Google began tapping into
users browsing histories to deliver more relevant, personal results.[61] Promising to grow with the
users browsing history, Personalized Search added a new dimension to search by incorporating past
user behavior.[61] The implementation of personalized search was a blow to those relying on SEO
techniques, as user browsing history was an element outside of their control.

XML Sitemaps (2005)[edit]

By allowing webmasters to create and submit XML files dictating URLs to be crawled as well as
procedural information regarding how the page should be crawled, Google expanded the scope of its
index.[62] Providing an additional method of organically increasing site exposure, Google hoped,
would decrease the need for shady SEO practices.

Big Daddy (2005)[edit]

Big Daddy was less an algorithmic change as it was a change of Google's crawling and indexing
infrastructure.[63] Pages with superfluous, reciprocal linking schemes and irrelevant outbound and
inbound links would be demoted in the new crawler.[63] Whereas previous updates handled the issue
of link reliability through algorithmic changes, the Big Daddy modified how many pages a site would
have crawled, and subsequently added to the index. The number of pages crawled on a site was
again dependent on the relevance and quality of its links.[63]