The Google Boys - Essay Example

Google’ was made of the word googol referring to the number represented by the numeral followed by 100 zeros, coined by Milton Sirotta and popularized in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. The company’s name reflects its mission “to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web”. Today Google is one of the world’s leading search engine companies. It is difficult to believe that it hasn’t existed ever. However, the company was founded only in 1998.

Its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin get acquainted at Stanford University, and as it often happens, a great friendship and companionship began with dislike. However, soon the fellows found a common topic of interest, and by January 1996, the 24-year-old Larry and 23-yar-old Sergey had started collaboration on their first search engine called BackRub, which could analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website. The friends were limited in cash and had to borrow computers for their network.

BackRub became popular in the campus. The work on the new technology was continued. Larry and Sergey bought a terabyte of disks at bargain price to build their computer housing. The Google’s first data center was in Larry’s dorm room. Having set up a business office, they started looking for potential partners. However, the new technology was not known and many companies, including Yahoo, refused a wonderful chance to get hold of it for almost no money. So Larry and Sergey decided to promote their engine themselves.

All they needed was money. It was Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and then a friend of a faculty member, who gave his blessing and a check for $100,000 to a new company, Google Inc. Sergey tells that they met Andy very early one morning on the porch at a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. “We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why dont I just write you a check? It was made out to Google Inc.”. While such a company didn’t exist it was impossible to deposit the check.

So for a couple of weeks Sergey, who was, obviously, the business organizer, set up a firm, locating funders among family, friends and acquaintances. As a result, the initial investment made almost $1 million. Google Inc. opened in September 1998, in a friend’s garage in Melno Park, California. The new company had a staff of three, with Craig Silverstein, now Google’s director of technology, being the first employee. Still in beta, Google.com answered 10,000 search queries each day. Soon the technology attracted attention of the press and USA Today and Le Monde printed their write-ups.

In December Google was named one of the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998 by PC Magazine. Having quickly outgrown their Melno Park home, the company moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. By February 1999, with its eight employees, the service answered more then 500,000 queries a day. Now the company had commercial search customers among leading corporations of the time. By June, the company had secured a round of funding, including $25 million from the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The two competing firms took seats on the board of directors and largely contributed to the development of Google Inc. The business flourished and the firm needed a new office. The new headquarters were situated in Mountain View, California. The company’s fame continued growing attracting new employees, customers, users and press. With the help of AOL/Netscape traffic levels exceeded 3 million searchers a day. On September 21, 1999, Google.com stooped being beta. This way a college research project turned into one of the best company’s in the sphere of computer technologies.

They continued to expand. Today Google employs about 11,000 people all over the world and has users in all the corners of the planet (Google 2008). References: Google. Google Milestones. Home > Corporate Information. Available at: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html (04.02.08.)