How many times have you heard people say, when they are trying to find out some information on a question they themselves cannot answer, “I’ll just ‘Google’ it!”? They type the words in the search box, and like magic 100,000,000 results come up for asking the ‘meaning of life’. Google is actually in the dictionary as verb!
Behind Google Lines
Who is behind this giant? When did it become the number one provider for information globally? What is a search engine and what does Google do to stay on top of the market?Just how did this giant of an engine that grabs so many results, 99% of the results being random non-related content, come to be? These are questions I will answer for you.
At the head of Google, Inc. are two men named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 1996 these two graduate students who attended Stanford University were working on finding out how many “backlinks”, the number of web pages that link to a certain site, were out there in the world wide web and how to pull them all together.
Originally, the name 0f the project was called “Backrub”, a clever one talking about how it rubbed the backlinks of the internet. This web-crawler traveled across the internet picking up all the sites that had a connection to a certain web-page, instead of the conventional method of search engines at the time, which only counted how many times the search term appeared on a page. The super-information-highway was on it’s way to being paved.
The name ‘Google’ comes from the misspelled ‘googol’, a name for the number one followed by one hundred zero’s. This was a powerful name to choose for a search engine that boasts it can find that many search results. What is interesting today is that the googol signifies more than just search results.
The “Google Guys” have come a long way from the days when they had to put together 10 four Gigabyte hard drives in a case built out of Lego’s, hence the colors of Google, they are advancing rapidly into every territory you can think of.
After maneuvering through financial difficulties, Google was able to get into a unique online auction and sell their shares at a high price, instantly making many Google employees millionaires. They did not stop there, Google grew into an enormous beast of a company buying out YouTube and creating service such as Google Earth and Google Voice. At the rate that this company is going, there will soon be a Google Life!
Google is top-secret too, they are not kissing and telling. That is perhaps why they stay on top and always ahead of the market in terms of fresh, innovative ideas. They are even turning green: recently this year Google Energy was created, after an investment was made in a North Dakota wind farm to harvest mega-watts. What else will Google do?
In basic terms, Google connects the world to the internet, and allows people to get the most of what they are searching for. The real story of Google is still a mystery, since they won’t even tell how many servers they have, so you will just have to guess that this company will probably take over the world!