About Google
History of Google
Google Capabilities
History of Google
Google is a revolutionary search engine. It has become the number one search engine worldwide through its dedication to relevant search.
The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met at Stanford University's graduate school of computer science in 1995. Stanford had a history of producing successful companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Excite. Page was fascinated by search and how he could apply mathematics to the ranking of websites in search results. As his dissertation, Page developed Google's algorithm, and named it PageRank after himself, which is still in existence today.
Page realized that having many websites that hyperlink to yours is good way of ranking the importance of a site. This lead to Page calling his dissertation BackRub, as it was an assessment of backlinks.
Brin was intrigued by the complexity and scale of Page's project. Brin devised that ranking could also be assessed by the relevance of each back link. Page and Brin soon realized that their results were far superior to AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant results.
The PageRank algorithm worked on links to and from websites. The bigger the world wide web got the better the search engine would work. That fact inspired the founders to name the engine Google, after the number googol; the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The first version of Google was released on the Stanford website in August 1996.
In the middle of 1998, Page and Brin realized that they had to turn Google into a company as opposed to a project. They wanted to sell the technology onto another search engine and valued it at $1.6 billion. However, despite meetings with nearly every search company in Silicon Valley, everyone found the technology interesting but turned them down, even the founders of Yahoo.
By late 1998, Google was serving more than 10,000 queries a day and they were soon outgrowing resources. They knew they had to find financial help.
Page and Brin final got their investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, who made an investment of double what the founders wanted, and walked away with a cheque for $100,000. Page and Brin went to Burger King to celebrate!
On September 7th 1998 Google Inc. was formally incorporated, with Page as CEO and Brin as president. In the spring of 1999, the company moved out of it's garage address and took up new residence in the heart of Palo Alto. Over the course of 1999 Google presented to many of the top-tier firms in Silicon Valley to invest, many of whom already invested in Yahoo, Excite and AOL. Funding finalized in June 1999, and Google had $25 million of investment.
Despite all the investment, Google had no business model, and didn't want to get side tracked from the aim of making search relevant and easy. The way they did it was the creation of Adwords in the Autumn 2000; the story of which comes from the founder of GoTo.com, Bill Gross, which is explained more in the History of Online Advertising.
From 2000 to 2004, Google grew from a zero to $3 billion revenues, majority of which came from its paid search facilities. In early 2002 Google launched Adwords in the UK to rival Overture; however it works on a Quality Score basis that ranks ads according to relevance.
On September 11, 2001, CNN and ABCnews crashed because of overwhelming search traffic regarding the World Trade Centres. Searchers turned to Google. By now, Google was serving 125 million searches a day, but the following week to 9/11 news related searches increased by a factor of sixty! This lead to the launch of Google News.
At the same time as the launch of Google News, the familiar homepage we see today was launched.
AOL choose to sign with Google instead of Overture in 2002 because of its latest asset; Adwords. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2002 that the AOL deal was Google's 'defining deal for paid listings'.
By 2002 Google was running MSN and Yahoo's natural search listings (Organic listings).
Between 2002 and today Google has made many acquisitions to strengthen its paid search technology. The most notable were the YouTube acquisition made in October of 2006, and Urchin technology for its Analytics function early in 2005.
There are three fundamental reasons why Google has grown to be so successful. One, it has its own high quality search listings; two, it has a successful paid search listing (Adwords); and three, it has its own traffic. By 2002, Google was the first to do this.
Google Capabilities:
Pay Per Click: Make the most of Google's majority share of internet traffic. If you are new to Pay Per Click visit our New to PPC? Page . For a comparison of our pay per click management capabilities visit our PPC page.
Pay Per Call: Get potential customers straight on the phone, not to the website.
Mobile Phone Ads: Google is transferring its PC internet dominance to mobile internet advertising. To learn more about how we can capture the Google traffic on mobile internet visit our Mobile Phone Ads page.
Local Business Ads: Your customers can find you locally on Google's local business ads. Find out more on our Local Business Ads page.
Banner Advertising: Build up your brand name by reaching over 64% of unique users through Google's content network. Find out how we can help, visit our pages.
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