Google

Google, Inc. is a U.S.-based corporation, established in 1998, that manages the Google search engine. Google is headquartered at the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California, and employs over 3,000 workers. Google's CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Novell, took over when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.

Google began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford who developed the theory that a search engine based on analysis of the relationships between Web sites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. It was originally nicknamed BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They formally founded their company, Google, Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home of a number of other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. Google quickly outgrew the University Avenue site, moving to a complex of buildings (known by some as "The Googleplex") in Mountain View's Amphitheater Parkway later that year.

The Google search engine gained a following among Internet users for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. In 2000, Google had begun selling advertisements by the keyword so that they would be more relevant to the end user. The ads were text-based in order to keep page design uncluttered and fast-loading. The concept of selling keyword advertising was originally pioneered by Overture, formerly Goto.com. While many of its dot-com siblings went under, Google quietly rose in stature while turning a profit.

U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading weblog-hosting Web site. The acquisition seemed inconsistent with the general mission of Google. However, the move secured the company's ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in Google News.

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80 percent of all search requests on the world wide web through its Web site and clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN Google's share fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results.

Google's declared code of conduct is Don't be evil. Their site includes humorous features such as cartoon modifications of their logo for special occasions, the option to display the site in fictional or humorous languages such as Klingon and Leet, and April Fool's jokes about the company.

It is conjectured that Google's response to Yahoo will be personalized searches, using the personal data that is gathering from Orkut, Gmail, and Froogle to give results based on the individual. In fact, there is a Personalized Google Search Beta in Google Labs, the experimental section of Google.com.

The name "Google" is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by a hundred zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

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It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Google".

(Extern link: http://www.google.com