Type: | Publicly Held |
Industry: | Internet & Technology |
Founded: | 1998 |
Founder(s): | Larry Page Sergey Brin |
Headquarters: | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 |
Country: | USA |
Employees: | 20,000 [1] |
Revenue: | $ 29, 321 million as of 2009 [2] |
Website: | www.google.com |
Blog: | Google Blogspot |
Facebook: | Google Facebook |
LinkedIn: | |
Twitter: | |
Key People | |
Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman |
Google is a multi-national company providing search, advertising, cloud computing services and many other business solutions. The company's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful[3] The company ranked 4th on Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2011.[4]
Company Background[edit | edit source]
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Stanford University graduate students partnered in building BackRub a search engine that determines the importance of individual web pages. This search engine operated for more than a year at Stanford servers until it took too much bandwith to suit the university.[5]
In 1997, Page and Brin decided to change the name of the BackRub search engine, the two brainstormed and came up with Google- a term derived from the mathematical term googol, which means the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.[6] Google represents the founders objective which is to organize an infinite amount of information on the web.
On September 4, 1998, Google was incorporated in California. The company started its business operations in a garage at Menlo Park. Craig Silverstein, was the first employee hired by Page and Brin, a fellow computer science graduate from Stanford.PC Magazine recognized Google as one of the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998[7]
First Investors[edit | edit source]
Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems was Google's first investor in 1998 followed by Ram Shriram, former President of Junglee and current Managing Director at Sherpalo Ventures. On June 7, 1999, Google received a major equity funding of $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the company's board of directors.[8]
Recognized Computer Scientist Joined Google[edit | edit source]
DARPA scientist Vinton Cerf joined Google on September 8 and 13, 2005 as Chief Internet Evangelist[9] and Dr. Kaifu Lee as head of the Google's China R & D Center. Microsoft filed a suit against Dr. Lee and Google with an argument that the violated the one year non-compete agreement on his contract with the company. [10] Microsoft and Google arrived a settlement agreement over Dr. Lee's hiring on December of the same year.[11]
Company Growth and Expansion[edit | edit source]
In 2000, Google is already available in different languages which include French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish,[12] Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. [13] The Google Adwords was launched with 350 customers and Google Toolbar. On June 11, 2000, the google home page became the largest search engine with 1 billion items.[14]
In 2001, Google is already available in 26 languages, Eric Schmidt was appointed Chairman and Wayne Rosing was hired as VP for Engineering.[15] The following year, Schmidt was elected CEO while Page assumed the position of president for products and Brin became president for technology.[16]
The company also launched the Google Search Appliance,new device that will allow corporations to use its search technology to scan their own networks, [17] Adwords Select, an enhanced version of Adwords was released, a self-service advertising system with the Cost-Per Click (CPC)feature, [18] the First Google API which enables developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and programs in their favorite environments, and the Google Labs.[19] The Google News and Froogle was also launched.Since then Google has released numerous products and services for internet users and businesses worldwide.
Initial Public Offering[edit | edit source]
Google's Initial Public Offering (IPO) was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2004.[20] and offered 19.6 million shares at a price of $85 per share. [21]
International Offices[edit | edit source]
The company also opened its international offices in Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Belgium, Denmark, Copehagen, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary Ireland,Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,Ukraine, United Kingdom and many other countries around the world.
Google China Local Domain[edit | edit source]
Google.cn, a local domain version of Google in China was launched in 2006 with some government restrictions. Google.com is down 10% most of the time, Google news is never available. Chinese government has been blocking and re-directing users searches to other websites.[22]
Partnerships[edit | edit source]
Google and AOL became search partners since 2002. The partnership of the two companies has been reportedly extended until 2015 and their new advertising, content and search, agreement has been expanded which include mobile search and AOL's content will be put on you tube.</ref>AOL & Google Partnership</ref>
In 2007, Google and China Mobile inked partnership to provide mobile and internet search services in China [23] as well as with Sales Force combining the company'son-demand CRM applications with the Google AdWords to provide a more successful integrated sales and marketing for businesses, and [24] with IBM on a supercomputing (Academic Cluster Computing Initiative) to inspire future computer scientists to think big and help them to learn to work at Internet scale on computing challenges.[25]
Community Services[edit | edit source]
On August 16, 2006, Google launched the free city wide WiFi in Mountainview, as its way to give back to the community.[26]
In 2008, Google.org announced its five key initiatives, Google Flu Trends, Google Powermeter, RE<C, Google Earth Engine and Google Crisis Response as part of the company's objective to help combat the many challenges in the world using the company's strength in information and technology.[27]
Acquisitions[edit | edit source]
Google acquired numerous companies since since its establishment to present which include Deja Usenet, Blooger.com, Urchin, Writely, Android, Jotspot, Doubleclick, Aardvark, You Tube, Picnik, Admob, reCaptcha, Slide, ITA Software and many others. [28]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Crunchbase
- ↑ Financial Tables
- ↑ Google Mission
- ↑ Fortune
- ↑ History
- ↑ Mathworld
- ↑ History
- ↑ Press Release
- ↑ Google Blog
- ↑ sfgate.com
- ↑ CNET
- ↑ Google Goes Global
- ↑ Global Expansion
- ↑ Timeline Year 2000
- ↑ Timeline Year 2001
- ↑ Press Release
- ↑ CNET
- ↑ Press Release
- ↑ Google ushers Web surfers into its labs
- ↑ SEC Document
- ↑ Businessweek.com
- ↑ [ http://www.pcworld.com/article/104813/china_hijacks_googles_domain_name.html pcworld.com]
- ↑ Promotionworld.com
- ↑ Salesforce.com
- ↑ Super Computing Project
- ↑ Google Blog
- ↑ Google.org
- ↑ CrunchBase