GOOGLE HISTORY

Chances are, if you've ever searched for anything on the Internet, you've discovered Google.com. Chances are also, once you've discovered Google.com, yours is one of over 150 million Internet searches that Google.com handles a day. With reliable and almost instantaneous results (the life span of a Google query normally lasts less than half a second), Google claims one of the widest audiences among Web sites, with 3 billion searchable documents and more than 21 million unique users per month. A dot-com company that made it, Google Inc. has not only survived, but is making a profit. Credit is given to top-rate technology, a rare sales model and an aggressive vision for what's ahead.

Google, Inc., the developer of the award-winning Google search engine, was conceived in 1995 by Stanford University computer science graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their meeting at a spring gathering of new Ph. D. computer science candidates launched a friendship and later a collaboration to find a unique approach to solving one of computing's biggest challenges: retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data.

By 1996 this collaboration had produced a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" that point to a given Web site. Continuing to perfect the technology in 1998, Page and Brin built their own computer housing in Larry's dorm room, a business office in Sergey's room, and Google had a new home. The next step was to find potential partners who might want to license their search technology, a technology that worked better than any available at the time. Among the contacts was David Filo, a friend and Yahoo! founder. Filo encouraged the two to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company.

The name "Google" was chosen from the word "googol," a mathematical term coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol, or google, represented a very large number and reflected the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information available on the World Wide Web.

Unable to secure the financial support of the major portal players of the day, cofounders Page and Brin decided to make a go of it on their own. They wrote a business plan, put their graduate studies on hold, and searched for an investor. They first approached Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystems, and friend of a Stanford faculty member. Impressed with their plans, Bechtolsheim wrote a check to Google Inc. for $100,000. The check, however, preceded the incorporation of the company, which followed in 1998.

Shortly after its incorporation, Google Inc. opened its new headquarters in the garage of a friend in Menlo Park, California. Their first employee was hired--Craig Silverstein, who later became Google's Director of Technology. By this time, Google .com was answering 10,000 search queries a day. Articles about the new Web site with relevant search results appeared in USA Today and Le Monde. In December, PC Magazine named Google to its list of Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998.

With the number of queries growing to 500,000 a day, and the number of employees growing to eight, Google moved its offices to University Avenue in Palo Alto in February 1999. With interest in the company growing as well and Google's commitment to running its servers on the Linux open source operating system, Google signed on with RedHat, its first commercial customer.

By early June, Google had secured $25 million in equity funding from two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Buyers. Staff members from the two investors joined Google's board of directors. Joining as new employees were Omid Kordestani from Netscape, who became Google's Vice President of Business Development and Sales; and UC Santa Barbara's Urs Hölzle, who became Google's Vice President of Engineering. Having again outgrown their work space, the company moved to the Googleplex , their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.