Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing. Both of his parents were computer scientists. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist.
It all started with a research project intending to create a search engine that would analyze the relationship between websites and produce better rankings of results then the existing techniques.
According to Brin, the research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub, which was named for its ability to analyze the back links pointing to a site. This linkage information is used to rank Web pages and sites.
A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.
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.
Page and Brin liked the name Google because it reflected their ‘mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information available in the Web’.
Google is a play in the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirrota, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.
In 1998, Google Inc. found its first office space at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, California. A friend sublet rooms to them that had a garage entrance. Larry and Sergey also hired their first employees, both the popular and industry press too notice and the praise began.
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.
Within one year of its founding in 1998, Google, was handling 3 million search request a day.
In 1999, Google, received its first significant influx of capital, $25 million in venture capital financing from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers, both located in Silicon Valley.
Google is now by far the world’s biggest search engine, representing 37.1 billion of all internet queries compared to 8,5 billion represented by Yahoo.
Early History of Google
