A Brief History Of Google As A Bedtime Story

I thought a while this morning what to write about, and I found an interesting story. it is called “A Brief History Of Google”. I liked the tone of it and I read it in its entirety. Here it is:

“Google was incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who’d met as doctoral students at Stanford University in 1995. They’d started working on a search engine that analyzed the relationships (links) between Web sites (rather than ranking results based on number of times the search term appeared on a page), and created BackRub, the precursor to Google, in 1996. By mid-year of 1998, they’d renamed their company Google.

Page and Brin had worked out of their dorm rooms until the incorporation, accomplished by raising one million dollars from friends, family, and angel investors. They put their PhDs on hold and moved the company into a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. There were four employees. At this point, Google answered ten thousand search queries per day.

By June of 1999, Google had managed to attract twenty five million dollars in equity funding. Eight employees moved into a new office in Palo Alto; they were answering five hundred thousand search queries per day. Late that summer, Page and Brin moved the corporate headquarters to Mountain View (where they remain); the company was performing three million searches per day. By the end of the year Google had thirty-nine employees.

Google launched search capabilities in ten non-English language versions and introduced the first comprehensive wireless search technology for WAP phones and handheld devices by mid 2000. In June of that year, Google became the largest search engine on the Web and answered eighteen million search queries per day. There were still less than one hundred employees.

Awards began to pour in. After early notice from Time and PC magazine, Forbes included Google in its Best of the Web roundup; PC World called it the Best Bet Search Engine; it was awarded WIRED Readers Raves for Most Intelligent Agent of the Internet.

By December of 2000, Google answered more than sixty million searches per day. That number almost doubled by February of 2001, just two months later, with one hundred million searches per day. Its agreements spread to Europe and Asia.

By 2001, Google powered the top three portals in Japan, as well as corporate sites for Procter & Gamble, IDG.net, Vodaphone, and Marthastewart.com. A few months later, Google was powering one hundred and thirty portals and destination sites in thirty countries. Advertisers numbered in the thousands and users could select from nearly forty languages. That summer, Universo Online (UOL) partnered with Google to provide millions of UOL users throughout Brazil and Latin America immediate access to the Google search engine. The global expansion continued with new sales offices in Germany and Japan.

By 2002, the total number of interface language options was seventy-four. AOL and Google announced a service agreement in June and the international expansion continued to London, Toronto, and Paris. By the end of the year, Google’s Web index was more than four billion Web documents. Interbrand, an international branding consultancy, named Google the 2002 Brand of the Year.

In early 2004, Google consolidated much of its Mountain View operations into a new headquarters building, called the Googleplex. A new Web-based mail service, G-mail, was introduced, and on April first, Google posted plans to open a research facility on the moon. By the end of that month, the S1 was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, declaring to the world the company’s intention to go public. With its more than three thousand employees watching worldwide, Google’s initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. It raised $1.67 billion, making the company worth $23 billion, and a few Google old-timers worth more than their wildest dreams.”

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