History of Google

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Contents

1Early history
o 1.1Beginning
o 1.2Late 1990s
o 1.32000s
o 1.42010s
2Financing and initial public offering
3Growth, 2003-2006
4Updates and Evolution of Ranking System
o 4.1Early Updates
o 4.2Boston/Cassandra/Dominic (2003)
o 4.3Fritz/Supplemental Index/Florida (2004)
o 4.4Personalized Search (2005)
o 4.5XML Sitemaps (2005)
o 4.6Big Daddy (2005)
o 4.7Universal Search (2007)
o 4.8Google Suggest/Instant
o 4.9Real Time Search (2009)
o 4.10Caffeine (2010)
o 4.11JCPenney SEO Incident (2011)
5Name
6Philanthropy
7Partnerships
o 7.1.mobi top-level domain (2007)
8Legal battles
o 8.1Gonzales v. Google
o 8.2Bedrock Computer Technologies, LLC vs. Google, Inc
9UK tax avoidance investigation
10See also
11References
12Further reading
13External links

Early history[edit]

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

The first Google computer at Stanford was housed in custom-made enclosures constructed
from Lego bricks.[1]

Beginning[edit]
Google began in 1995 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin Ph.D. students
at Stanford University.[2]
In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been consideringamong 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 outputwhich, for a given URL,
consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importancethe 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]
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 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 [11]