Google began as a research project of Larry Page and Sergy Brin in 1996 when they were both doctoral students at Stanford University in California. At the time, search engines ranked the results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page. Larry and Sergy theorized about a better system that would analyze the relationship between websites. Almost like a voting system, the relevance of the websites was determined by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that link to the original website. They called this new technology PageRank. One way to describe this is as being popular at school, the more friends you have, the more popular you are. And let’s say you are friends with the most popular kid in school, this would give you more street cred and make you more important.
The search engine was initially called BackRub until they changed the name to Google, which originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, which is a very large number. This name was chosen to indicate that the search engine wants to provide large amounts of information to people. Initially, Google operated under the Stanford University website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu until they registered the domain google.com in September 1997. Four years later, the number of visits unique monthly to Google exceeded one billion.
The Google search engine is the most popular service of companies and the most dominant search engine. Over the years, Google has released a number of online productivity tools including Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Apps. Other enterprising solutions include Google Earth and Google Maps, Google New, and Google Translate. The list goes on.
The company has not been without controversy over the years. There has been a lot of criticism of Google about the possibility of misuse and manipulation of search results. Recently, US regulators forced Google to agree to legally binding changes to the way it presents some search results and runs its search advertising after nearly two years of investigation. Google was accused of being biased in promoting and ranking its own services, including videos, shopping, and maps, above equally or better-rated rivals. This was examined for two years by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC director recently stated, “We thoroughly investigated whether Google uses search bias” to push its own products higher and those of its rivals lower in search results. But after nearly two years, he said, “the commission voted to close this investigation. Although some evidence suggested it was trying to eliminate competition, the main reason was to improve the user experience.”
Google has several subsidiaries, including subAdMob, DoubleClick, Motorola Mobility, On2 Technologies, Picnik, Zagat, and YouTube. They also invest in cloud computing, internet searches, and advertising technologies. They generate most of their revenue from advertising their AdWords program.
It looks like Google will continue to dominate the online search and services industry for some time to come. No doubt there will be more criticism and research to come. It will be interesting to see who is the market leader 10-20 years from now.