The Birth of Google

 

Google, in full Google LLC formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017), American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that is a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.

Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success. In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests.

Searching for business

Brin and Page, who met as graduate students at Stanford University, were intrigued with the idea of extracting meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room at Stanford to devise a new type of search technology, which they dubbed BackRub. The key was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each Web site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Most search engines simply returned a list of Web sites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Brin and Page incorporated into the search function the number of links each Web site had; i.e., a Web site with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than one with just a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities. Further, a link from a heavily linked Web site would be a more valuable “vote” than one from a more obscure Web site.

In mid-1998 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing (one of their first investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc.). They ultimately raised about $1 million from investors, family, and friends and set up shop in Menlo Park, California, under the name Google, which was derived from a misspelling of Page’s original planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeroes). By mid-1999, when Google received a $25 million round of venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 queries per day. Activity began to explode in 2000, when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, Yahoo!. By 2004, when Yahoo! was dispensed with Google’s services, users were searching on Google 200 million times a day. That growth only continued: by the end of 2011 Google was handling some three billion searches per day. The company’s name became so ubiquitous that it entered the lexicon as a verb: to google became a common expression for searching the Internet.

To accommodate this unprecedented mass of data, Google built 11 data centers around the world, each of them containing several hundred thousand servers (basically, multiprocessor personal computers and hard drives mounted in specially constructed racks). Google’s interlinked computers probably number several million. The heart of Google’s operation, however, is built around three proprietary pieces of computer code: Google File System (GFS), Bigtable, and MapReduce. GFS handles the storage of data in “chunks” across several machines; Bigtable is the company’s database program; and MapReduce is used by Google to generate higher-level data (e.g., putting together an index of Web pages that contain the words “Chicago,” “theatre,” and “participatory”).

The extraordinary growth of Google led to internal management problems. Almost from the beginning, investors felt that Brin and Page needed an experienced manager at the helm, and in 2001 they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the company. Schmidt, who previously had held the same positions at the software company Novell Inc., had a doctorate in computer science and melded well with the technocratic impulses of the founders. During Schmidt’s reign as CEO, Page served as president of products, and Brin was president of technology. The trio ran the company as a “triumvirate” until Page took on the CEO role in 2011, Schmidt became executive chairman, and Brin adopted the title of director of special projects.

The company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2004 raised $1.66 billion for the company and made Brin and Page instant billionaires. In fact, the IPO created 7 billionaires and 900 millionaires from the early stockholders. The stock offering also made news because of the unusual way it was handled. Shares were sold in a public auction intended to put the average investor on an equal footing with financial industry professionals. Google was added to the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) stock index in 2006. In 2012 Google’s market capitalization made it one of the largest American companies not in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Google reorganized itself in August 2015 to become a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. Internet search, advertising, apps, and maps, as well as the mobile operating system Android and the video-sharing site YouTube, remained under Google. Separate Google ventures—such as longevity research company Calico, home-products company Nest, and research lab Google X—became separate firms under Alphabet. Page became CEO of Alphabet, Brin its president, and Schmidt its executive chairman. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of products, became Google’s new CEO. Alphabet again reorganized in 2017 to create an intermediate holding company, XXVI Holdings, and to convert Google into a limited liability company (LLC). In 2018 Schmidt stepped down as executive chairman. More changes followed in 2019 as both Brin and Page left their posts as president and CEO, respectively. However, they both remained on Alphabet’s board of directors. Pichai became CEO of the holding company while retaining that position at Google.

Advertising growth

Google’s strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google’s popularity in particular. Analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. For example, American newspaper advertising fell from a peak of $64 billion in 2000 to $20.7 billion in 2011, while global online advertising grew from approximately $6 billion in 2000 to more than $72 billion in 2011.

Since its founding, Google has spent large sums to secure what it has calculated to be significant Internet marketing advantages. For example, in 2003 Google spent $102 million to acquire Applied Semantics, the makers of AdSense, a service that signed up owners of Web sites to run various types of ads on their Web pages. In 2006 Google again paid $102 million for another Web advertisement business, dMarc Broadcasting, and that same year it announced that it would pay $900 million over three and a half years for the right to sell ads on MySpace.com. In 2007 Google made its largest acquisition to date, buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Two years later the company responded to the explosive growth of the mobile applications market with a $750 million deal to acquire the mobile advertising network AdMob. All of these purchases were part of Google’s effort to expand from its search engine business into advertising by combining the various firms’ databases of information in order to tailor ads to consumers’ individual preferences.

Other services

Google Video and YouTube

Google’s expansion, fueled largely by keyword-based Web advertising, provided it with a sound footing to compete for dominance in new Web services. One of these was the delivery of video content. In January 2005 Google launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close-captioned text from television broadcasts. A few months later Google began accepting user-submitted videos, with submitters setting the prices for others to download and view the videos. In January 2006 Google Video Store opened, featuring premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS Corporation (television shows) and Sony Corporation (movies). In June 2006 Google began offering premium content for free but with ads.

For all of its marketing advantages, however, Google was unable to overtake the upstart leader in online videos, YouTube. Following its introduction in 2005, YouTube quickly became the favorite site for users to upload small video files, some of which attracted millions of viewers. Unable to generate anything close to the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. Rather than merge the Web sites, however, Google continued YouTube’s operation as a separate entity. In 2012 Google shut down Google Video and moved videos from there to YouTube. That same year, despite estimated revenues of more than $1 billion, Google said that YouTube remained an “investment” and has not said whether the division was profitable.

Gmail

In 2004 Google began offering a free Web-based e-mail account to select “beta” testers (a beta product being a product not yet in its final form). The service, known as Gmail, was opened to the general public in 2007 while still officially in its beta stage. One of the main appeals of Gmail was that it gave users an e-mail address that was independent of any particular Internet service provider (ISP), thus making it easier to maintain a permanent address. In addition, the service offered an unprecedented one gigabyte (one billion bytes) of free e-mail storage space, though users were also presented with advertisements based on keywords that the Google search engine found in their messages. Google later expanded the amount of free storage space given to users to seven gigabytes and allowed users to rent additional space. In 2007 the company acquired Postini, an e-mail services firm, for $625 million in order to improve Gmail’s security, especially in Google’s efforts to sign up businesses. In 2009 Google removed the beta status of Gmail, increasing its appeal to business users.

In January 2010 Google announced that it had detected a series of sophisticated hacking attacks, originating in China, that was directed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China. In some cases, the accounts had been reconfigured to forward all incoming and outgoing e-mails to unfamiliar addresses. Google’s immediate response was to change Gmail’s protocol from the Web standard HTTP to the encrypted HTTPS, which increased security at the expense of speed. The attacks also led Google to threaten to reverse its stance, which allowed the Chinese government to censor Google. cn site and allow Chinese users to receive unfiltered search results. This brought the company into conflict with the Chinese government and raised the possibility of Google’s exiting the Chinese market altogether. In March, Google avoided direct conflict by automatically redirecting Chinese users to Google. cn to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk. This arrangement continued until Google’s government-issued license to operate in China came up for annual renewal at the end of June. At that time Google changed Google. c n so that users could either use the censored Chinese site for services such as music search or manually click on a link to Google.com.hk for Web search. This move conciliated with the Chinese government, which renewed Google’s license in July 2010.

Google Books

Before Google was even launched as a company, its founders had worked on digital book projects at Stanford and had always envisioned the day when Internet users would be able to search content in books. In 2004 the company announced Google Print, a project with several major libraries around the world that would begin to make their holdings freely available on the Internet. The company began by scanning public-domain books from the libraries’ collections, using sophisticated equipment. The digital files were then converted into portable document files (PDFs) that were fully searchable, downloadable, and printable. Works still in copyright appeared only in fragmented “snippet” form. In 2005 the company changed the name of the project to Google Books, and about one million books per year were scanned in its initial years of operation. As of 2012, Google had scanned more than 15 million books.

Meanwhile, groups of authors and publishers filed suit to stop the company from making passages from their copyrighted books available over the Internet. In 2008 Google reached a legal settlement in which the company agreed to pay the groups $125 million for past transgressions, though users could continue to read for free up to 20 percent of each work scanned by Google. In exchange for allowing parts of their works to be read online, the authors and publishers would receive 63 percent of all advertising revenue generated by page views of their material on Google’s Web site.

Google Apps and Chrome

In 2006, in what many in the industry considered the opening salvo in a war with Microsoft, Google introduced Google Apps—application software hosted by Google that runs through users’ Web browsers. The first free programs included Google Calendar (a scheduling program), Google Talk (an instant messaging program), and Google Page Creator (a Web-page-creation program). In order to use these free programs, users viewed advertisements and stored their data on Google’s equipment. This type of deployment, in which both the data and the programs are located somewhere on the Internet, is often called cloud computing.

Between 2006 and 2007 Google bought or developed various traditional business programs (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software) that were eventually collectively named Google Docs. Like Google Apps, Google Docs is used through a browser that connects to the data on Google’s machines. In 2007 Google introduced a Premier Edition of its Google Apps that included 25 gigabytes of e-mail storage, security functions from the recently acquired Postini software, and no advertisements. As the components of Google Docs became available, they were added to both the free ad-supported Google Apps and the Premier Edition. In particular, Google Docs was marketed as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

In 2008 Google released Chrome, a Web browser with an advanced JavaScript engine better suited for running programs within the browser. The following year the company announced plans to develop an open-source operating system, known as Chrome OS. The first devices to use Chrome OS were released in 2011 and were netbooks called Chromebooks. Chrome OS, which runs on top of a Linux kernel, requires fewer system resources than most operating systems because it uses cloud computing. The only software running on a Chrome OS device is the Chrome browser, all other software applications are supplied by Google Apps. In 2012 Chrome surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) to become the most popular Web browser and, as of 2020, has maintained its lead over IE, Microsoft’s Edge (IE’s replacement), Mozilla Corporation’s Firefox, and Apple Inc.’s Safari

Android operating system

Google’s entry into the lucrative mobile operating system market was based on its acquisition in 2005 of Android Inc., which at that time had not released any products. Two years later Google announced the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of dozens of technology and mobile telephone companies, including Intel Corporation, Motorola, Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, Texas Instruments Incorporated, LG Electronics, Inc., Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel Corporation, and T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom). The consortium was created in order to develop and promote Android, a free open-source operating system based on Linux. The first phone to feature the new operating system was the T-Mobile G1, released in October 2008, though Android-based phones really required the more capable third-generation (3G) wireless networks in order to take full advantage of all the system’s features, such as one-touch Google searches, Google Docs, Google Earth, and Google Street View.

In 2010 Google entered into direct competition with Apple’s iPhone by introducing the Nexus One smartphone. Nicknamed the “Google Phone,” the Nexus One used the latest version of Android and featured a large, vibrant display screen, aesthetically pleasing design, and a voice-to-text messaging system that was based on advanced voice-recognition software. However, its lack of native support for multi-touch—a typing and navigation feature pioneered by Apple that allowed users more flexibility in interacting with touchscreens—was seen as a drawback when compared with other handsets in its class. Despite Android’s perceived drawbacks compared with Apple’s smartphone iOS, by the end of 2011, Android led the mobile phone industry with a 52 percent global market share, more than triple that of iOS.

In 2010 Google’s hardware partners also began releasing tablet computers based on the Android operating system. The first product was criticized for poor performance, but by the end of 2011 Android-based tablets had gained ground on the hugely popular Apple iPad. Of the 68 million tablets estimated to have shipped in that year, 39 percent ran Android, compared with nearly 60 percent being iPads.

Google was obliged to battle competitors over Android in the courts as well as in the marketplace. In 2010, for example, Oracle Corporation sued Google for $6.1 billion in damages, claiming Android had violated numerous patents relating to Oracle’s Java programming language. (After two years in court, Google eventually won the lawsuit.) Instead of attacking Google directly, Apple Inc. sued makers of Android smartphones, such as HTC, Motorola Mobility, and Samsung, over alleged patent violations. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was said to have claimed, “I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.” The patent wars over mobile operating systems seemed unresolvable, as suits and countersuits were filed with each release of a new version.

Social networks and Google+

Google was late to recognize the popularity and advertising potential of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Its first attempt to create a social network, Google Buzz, started in 2010 and closed less than two years later. Among several problems, the network was limited to users who had Gmail accounts, and it created privacy issues by featuring a default setting that showed a user’s profile to anyone. Even before Google Buzz had shut down, the company launched Google+ in June 2011, at first to a limited audience and then to anyone. Within a year of its start, the social network service had attracted more than 170 million users. Facebook, by contrast, had taken five years to reach 150 million users.

Nevertheless, Google+ faced a formidable competitor in Facebook, which by mid-2012 had some 900 million users. Facebook users spent far more time on their site, clocking six to seven hours per month, while Google+ users averaged a little more than three minutes per month. Because Facebook did not permit Google’s Web indexing software to penetrate its servers, Google was unable to include the giant social network in its search results, thus losing potentially valuable data from one of the most-trafficked networks on the Internet. Still, the company appeared to be fully supportive of Google+. Seeing the value of games in retaining users on social networks, it quickly released a games area for the service. It also developed innovative features that were not available on Facebook. For example, with Hangouts, users could instantly create free video conferences for up to 10 people. The company also added Google+ pages for businesses to market their products and brands. However, Google+ never supplanted Facebook, and the service was discontinued in 2019.

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