The Google StoryGoogle was founded by two Ph.D. computer science students at Stanford University in California – Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Page and Brin began their hero’s journey, they didn’t know exactly where they were headed.
Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing. Both of his parents were computer scientists. His father was a university professor and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, while his mother was a teacher of computer programming.
Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist. His entire family fled the Soviet Union in 1979 under the threat of growing anti-Semitism and began their new lives as immigrants in the United States.
According to Brin, the research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.
Within the next few years, the prototype system had been converted into progressively improved versions, and these were substantially more effective than any other search engine then available.
As the buzz about their project spread, more and more people began to use it. Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at on their system.
They named their successor search engine Google, in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term googol, which is the immense large number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google Inc. opened its door as a business entity in September 1998, operating out of modest facilities in a Menlo Park, California garage.
Google was also in the process of developing a unique company culture. It operated in an informal atmosphere that facilitated both collegiality and an easy exchange of ideas.
By the end of 2000, Google was handling more than 100 million searches each day. Shortly thereafter, Google began to deliver new innovations and establish new partnerships to enter the burgeoning field of mobile wireless computer.
By expanding into this field, Google continued to pursue its strategy of putting search into hands of as many as possible.
The Google Story
