History of Google
History of Google
Many significant changes in the world of internet took place in the 1990s. Since then, there have been many continuous changes in internet technology.
These changes paved way to the introduction of the major search engine, Google, which is a widely used web based searching system that makes using the internet or locating anything on the internet quite easy and fast.
The history of Google can be traced back to 1996 as a research project that was conducted by students at Stanford namely Sergy Brin and Larry Page.
If you are wondering about some matches that are made in heaven, then the history of Google can be traced to a perfect example. It all happened when Larry was a 22 year old graduate student from the University of Michigan who went to Stanford with the intention of attending the school. On the other hand, the 21 year old Sergy was only there to show Larry around the campus. By the year 1996, the two students were firm friends
Working on the Stanford Digital Library Project, the two friends embarked on a project that was designed to create a search engine called BackPub. The project’s main goal was to create enabling technologies for a single incorporated and universal digital library.
The project that led to a name that is well known today, Google, was funded via the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. From a little project to a name likely to be mentioned anytime young and old talk about computers, Google has continued to make significant milestones and continues to grow so fast today.
Page put more focus on finding out which web pages linked to certain pages while also considering the nature of such backlinks. In March 1996, Page’s web crawler started exploring the web with the Stanford home page acting as his only starting point.
The two students than converted the backlink data they gathered into a measure of their importance to a given web page where they developed the PageRank algorithm. When they were analyzing BlackRub’s output (their search engine) they noted that a search engine that is based on PageRanks was going to produce better results than the already existing techniques. At the time, the search engines that were there ranked results based on how many times the search term or keyword appeared on the page.
Strongly convinced that the pages with the highest number of links from other relevant websites appeared to be the most relevant pages, the two students tested their thesis and laid the foundation for their search.
The history of Google can also be traced to when the search engine originally used the Stanford University website. The domain was google.stanford.edu. Google.com was registered on the 15, September 1997 where google Inc was formally incorporated as the company in 1998. By the end of 1998, the giant search engine had an index of approximately 60 million pages. The page was also marked BETA with many articles being written by various websites that showed Google was a better search engine than its competitors like Excite.com. The search engine was also praised for being more innovative technology wise as compared to the already overloaded portal sites that had been seen as the future of the web at that time
The history of Google and what the final results are today has attracted a loyal following of internet users who prefer a user friendly search engine. Around the year 2000, the search engine began selling adverts that were associated with search keywords. These ads were solely text based to maintain a page that was uncluttered and maximized loading page. The keywords were sold according to a combination of click-through and price bids. Bids started from as low as $.05 per click. This idea was started by goto.com that was later on acquired by Yahoo and rebranded as Yahoo Search Marketing. Even as many failed in the internet marketplace, Google.com was able to quietly rise in its stature and also in generating revenue.
The name google came about as a result of a misspelling of the word googol. The name googol referred to numbers represented by a 1 and followed by one hundred zeros. However, having found its way into the everyday used language, the verb Google was then included to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary in 2006 and means to use the search engine Google to obtain information on the internet. Today, Google remains the giant search engine that can be used for both short and long term benefits.