The Concept of a Wide Memory Bank - Essay Example

Google Motivational Introduction Searching the net With the introduction of the Internet in 1990 for public use, the world changed drastically. People now communicated faster. E-mail, forums and the World Wide Web (www) became popular. People could now find everything they needed with just one click of mouse. No one and nothing was out of reach. Business transactions are able to be completed in an hour. Corporations could have urgent meetings without travel expenses and time to worry about. Families separated by oceans could finally keep in touch. With the internet, life became more comfortable & convenient. Many may not know this but searching the net started as early as the 1960’s. The concept of a wide memory bank was even earlier, in 1945. Since the Internet is a pretty big world on its own technically-speaking, there have been several search engines developed from 1960 to the present in the hopes of being able to somewhat organize the Internet. With the continuous development of the World Wide Web, so did the improvement & growth of these search engines. A star is born In January 1996, Larry Page was looking for a theme for his dissertation paper. He was a Ph.D. student at Stanford with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford. He loved to take things apart & see how they worked. This is exactly what happened with Larry and the World Wide Web. For a theme, Larry had thought of, among others, trying to understand the Web’s link structure. As users of the Web know, pages on the web are inter-connected by links or those words and/or phrases that can be clicked on. With the help of a fellow Ph. D. student, Sergey Brin, Larry started his research project named BackRub. They hypothesized that the pages having the most links from other reliable Web sites were the most significant ones with the search. As a result of this research, the search engine called Google was “incorporated on September 4, 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California” (History of Google). Because it incorporated simplicity in its design, Google easily became the most well-liked search engine, besting Hotbot or Excite.com. Google’s brothers & sisters Google’s popularity continued to spread because users found it easy to use. Accordingly, the makers of Google added more features to the web page to make it more user-friendly. These additions were supposed to help internet users access information on the web with much ease. The geniuses behind it also made Google available on WAP, i-mode phones and the like so users can access it even when they were away from their personal computers (PC). According to the Google website, “you’ll be able to find information in many different language; check stock quotes, maps, and new headlines; lookup phonebook listings for every city in the United States; search billions of images and peruse the world’s largest archive of Usenet messages – more than 1 billion posts dating back to 1981.” (http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html) Google had also come up with the Google toolbar so users won’t need to be on Google’s search page to look for something. Google Adwords is also another Google first. Wanting to distinguish advertisements from search results, they started Adwords where advertisers post ads which they pay for only the ads get clicked by customers. On the other hand, Google also made Google AdSense where, matched with Google’s Search feature, one just needs to type in keywords and a list shows up containing words that may be in a site or page. Truly, Google continues to make innovations in line with its mission of organizing the world’s information and making it within reach for and useful to everyone. Reaping the rewards Since that day of its incorporation in a garage, Google has come a long way. It is the most widely used search engine today. It has also become familiar to young and old alike because of the humorous shapes and designs its name takes on to mark special events. For example, when Halloween draws near the “Google” letters on the main search page is decorated with a Halloween theme. It has been part of a house, had pumpkins, stood beside ghosts, had cobwebs and been wrapped in bandage like a mummy among others. Google has also done it for St. Patrick’s Day and Christmas, to name a few. The company’s owners, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, at #52 joined other billionaires such as Bill Gates & Warren Buffet on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2004. Each had a net worth of $ 1 billion. As of late, they rank # 26 on The World’s Billionaires 2009 compiled by Forbes.com. Sergey Brin, President of Technology for Google, has a net worth of $ 12 billion. Google’s co-founder and President of Products Larry Page also has a net worth of $12 billion, too. (http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/D664.html) Early Finances Google was launched in 1998 but no one wanted to buy or grant any license to Brin & Pages’ search technology. However, $100,000 came from Andy Bechtolsheim, computer scientist & owner of Sun Microsystems, and, in the next year, $25 million from venture capitalists Sequioa Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Also in 1999, Google was selected by AOL, and then by Yahoo in the succeeding year, to be their search partner. The Google Toolbar was seen on the web in 2000. Google has been continuously earning search market share every year ever since. Latest Net Worth In September 2004, each Google stock was worth $102.70. As of today, if one wants to buy stock in Google, one has to pay $408.25 per stock. On January 22, 2009, Google reported its net income had fallen 68% from 2008 although it did better than Wall Street’s expectations. They said the decline was due to one-time charges amounting to $1.1 billion of investments Google had in Clearwire, a wireless broadband provider, and AOL of Time Warner. According to The New York Times (2009, January), “Google’s net revenue… jumped nearly 25 percent, to $4.22 billion, from $3.39 billion a year earlier.” References http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/D664.html http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html Helf, M. (2009, January). Google Beats Forecast Even as Its Profit Tapers. The New York Times. Retrieved May 11, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/technology/ companies/23google.html Read More