If we need to find out about something, and asking people around us is no help at all..what do we do? we GOOGLE it! Yes, google has become a noun lately. Anything we need to know we just "google" it and --voil
à !--
the answers are right in front of our eyes!
But there are still some people who don't know what google is. Doesn't own a computer, probably? Google is a
search engine created by
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in 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 relationships between websites. They called this new technology "PageRank", where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", 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 one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.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 a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow Ph.D. student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.
Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not experienced in HTML, the language for designing web pages.
In 2010, Google updated its homepage with a new brighter logo.
LARRY PAGE
Larry Page was born into a Jewish family in East Lansing, Michigan. His parents were computer science professors at Michigan State University. During an interview, Page said that "their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said,"From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business. So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."
Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School (1991). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honours and a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter), served as the president of the HKN in Fall 1994, and was a member of the solar car team.
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a hugegraph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got". Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.
John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'."
Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.
To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.
SERGEY BRIN
Sergey Brin is the cofounder of the Google search engine. He and fellow Stanford University student Larry Page worked together on a project while doing a Ph.D. in Computer Science. The Pair left their studies to focus on developing the Google search engine. Sergey Brin and his partner Larry Page went on to become two of the wealthiest young entrepreneurs in America with the success of their university project, Google.
Sergey Mihailovich Brin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1973. The Brin family moved from Russia to the United States of American in 1979 when Sergey was 5 years of age. His father gained work as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother went on to work at NASA.
Brin grew up fascinated by computers and had one from a very early age, when home computers were not common in households (Commodore 64 days). He went on to receive a bachelor of science degree at the University of Maryland, with honors in mathematics and computer science in 1993. Brin then went on to start his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Stanford University.
While studying for his Ph.D he met Lawrence Page and went on to work with on a project to organize the Internet and improve the way people search for information. They first nicknamed the project "BackRub" as it relied heavily on the number and relevancy of links pointing to a website (later called PageRank).
"Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page." Sergey Brin Quote
Brin and Page left their studies at Stanford University and started Google Inc. in 1998. The popularity of the search engine increased dramatically, forcing the company to constantly expand its computing power, improve its technology, and move to bigger premises (now situated at the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California). The company became a publicly traded company in 2004 (traded on the NASDAQ as GOOG) with individual shares being valued at $85 each and quickly rose to $100+ in the first day of trading. Google has continued to grow through acquiring and creating new Internet services and products online. The stock price also grew rapidly to more than $420 per share at the end of November in 2005.
"Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We believe that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. We have found that offering a high-quality user experience leads to increased traffic and strong word-of-mouth promotion." SEC Filing of Google
Sergey Brin and Larry Page shared 16th position on the Richest Americans list released by the Forbes business magazine in 2005, having an estimated $11 billion USD each.
Brin remains active in the company with the role of the president of Technology.
