The Colossus Of The Internet

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There once was a small company that started as a research project. It was started by a student studying for his PhD. His name was Larry Page and he had an idea. That idea was that a search engine would work better if it analyzed relationships between websites. Previous to this, search engines worked by ranking results by how many times that they appeared on a page. The project soon became the Google search engine and was started in January 1996. The name Google came from the misspelling of the word googol. Googol refers to ten to the one hundredth power. The original name for the Google search engine was BackRub. So why would anyone want to name a search engine BackRub? It was given that name because of the fact that it checked the back links and used them to determine a sites importance. Soon another PhD student joined Google and his name was Sergey Brin. Both students were studying for their PhD at Stanford University in California.

Google started out with a Stanford University domain. A domain is the address where the website is located and Google was originally located at google.stanford.edu. It didn't take long for the company to be incorporated. This happened on September 4, 1998.This was another company that began in a garage, much like Apple. Google was initially able to raise just over one million dollars from investors, the most famous of which was Andy Bechtolsheim. He was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and had invested $100,000 in the fledgling company. I guess he saw the potential in Google far before most other people, but I bet that even he became shocked at what Google had become. The company didn't stay in that garage too long. It moved to Palo Alto in March 1999 and into an office building not another garage.

The company grew in size so fast that by 2003 it had moved from two other sites, because it just became too big for the space. In 2003 it leased a complex of buildings located in Mountain View California and is still there today, but now owns the property. Guess what they call this complex of buildings? If you guessed Googleplex, you would have been correct. The search engine just kept becoming more and more popular and began to far outdistance the other search engines in use. Yahoo was a close second at one time. Ads were eventually allowed, but they were text based to keep the search speed up. Google ran into trouble when it was sued by Overture for patent violations and agreed to issue stock to Yahoo, the parent company, for the right to continue to use certain patents permanently, in connection with its search engine.

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In 2004 Google issued an initial offering of over 19,000,000 shares at a price of $85 each. Morgan Stanley sold the stock using an auction format online. The sale netted over 1.6 billion dollars and now Google had a market capitalization of over 23 billion dollars. The little company that started in a garage just a few years before had become a giant. Google held most of the shares. While many people who worked for Google became millionaires, they were not the only ones to benefit. Yahoo also benefited, because of the Google stock they had received. They owned almost 8.5 million shares of Google. In three years the stock went for $700 per share. The growth of Google has been ;phenomenal. It has turned out to be one of the most successful companies on the planet.

Google has not stood still. It has been busy acquiring other companies. To illustrate my point, who do you think owns YouTube? If you said YouTube, you are wrong. Google bought YouTube in 2006 by trading stock for it. It traded 1.65 billion dollars worth. Google Earth used to be Earth Viewer owned by Keyhole, Inc, until Google bought it. Google has purchased numerous small and start-up companies. It has not only bought companies, it has also partnered with other companies and government agencies. It entered into a partnership with NASA Ames Research Center in 2005. The idea was for Google to work on various different projects. It also joined into a partnership with its old friend Sun Microsystems in the same year and helped distribute their technology while Sun did the same for Google.

Google has gotten involved in a big way in mobile devices and purchased the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi. It joined Fox Interactive Media of News Corp and provided them with search and advertising for MySpace. So where does Google make most of its money? Right now it is from advertising, but it is starting to make large profits from other areas. It is interesting to note that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were listed as having a net worth each of 18.5 billion dollars in 2007.

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Google has a plethora of free applications that anyone can download, but it also has commercial versions of some. An example of this is Google Earth. It comes in the free version and the pro version. Besides software that is for sale, there is talk that it will market it own cell phone next year. This phone will use the Android mobile operating system much as they do now. There are rumors that Google will be getting into hardware in a much larger way soon. Whether this will come to pass or not, is anyone's guess. Google is a giant that is looking to expand and use some of its huge assets in other ventures. We have seen the Chrome web browser appear on the scene and maybe this will lead to financial opportunities in the future. It has been said that a new operating system could be created using this web browser technology, that could be applied to home computers and that it could eventually compete with Windows. By the way its operating system is open source and this is a unique approach in business.

Google is a great company, one that I am sure other companies like Microsoft would love to see it leave the Internet, but this is very unlikely to ever happen. I am sure that Google knows where its bread is buttered, they have proved this many times. While others may be looking for Google to make a mis-step, I am looking forward to seeing better and better products from them.