They say the Internet is vast; and it truly is. With seemingly limitless enthusiasm, humanity marches forever onwards (and hopefully upwards as well, though unfortunately not in many cases) in its quest and thirst for knowledge and information. A well known saying is that knowledge is power and today knowledge can be found quicker and easier than ever before, through the use of the Internet. This empowerment of the people is a good and positive thing in most cases, though it can also be a sad testament to the state of some minds when this bright tool is used for more shadowy reasons. But because the Internet is so large and all-encompassing in its subject matter, there can often be a where do I start moment that holds us up. It allows us to momentarily consider that all the information in the world is of no use at all, if it cannot be sorted for our convenience and accessed for our scrutiny and subsequent use. This is where search engines come in of course, without which the Internet would probably not be used half as much as it is, certainly not by the general populace at least. Of the hundreds of such useful names out there, the biggest, most used and best known is of course, Google.

Behold the Google

But where did Google come from?

It was in 1995 that the seeds were first sown, when two graduate students in computer science met at Stanford University, and at first apparently did not get on at all. Larry Page was 24 years old and on a visit from the University of Michigan, while Russian born Sergey Brin was a year younger and selected among a group to act as hosts and gave him a tour. Apparently they spent most of their time arguing with one another about this and that and almost everything else, but on one topic they agreed; that a common problem, as computer programs became more and more powerful and contained increasing amounts of data, was how to sort out what was relevant in the compiled data to each and every new request for information. Both were frustrated that so much time had to be spent sorting through what was not required to find something of value to whatever project was being undertaken, and both were determined to do something about it - and do it in such a way that others could use it without the need for a high expense. Settling their differences on other matters, the pair’s mutual respect of the other’s abilities caused them to begin a joint venture on a search engine at the beginning of the next year which they named 'BackRub.' This forerunner of Google used a new way of analyzing a website’s 'back links' that singled it out from amongst a crowd of other sites. It proved to work very well, and soon word began to spread about it’s effectiveness as a search tool. It works well, but it can work better still! The pair was encouraged, and as the next couple of years rolled on, they continued to work on and improve their analysis techniques that BackRub employed, and soon realized that they were on to a winner. Investing in their project, they looked for bargains whenever purchasing disks and equipment; and set up headquarters in Larry Page’s dormitory room. They also began to look around for interested parties to sell their ideas to, but surprisingly found little interest amongst the major Internet players, who did not appear to realize the potential of what the duo had created.

The founder of Yahoo!, David Filo, was known to them and he encouraged them to begin their own company rather than sell a license of use to others who did not really value the prospects of searching. But he himself did not offer them a partnership at the time, as the techniques they used were not yet fully developed. So Larry and Sergey drew up a business plan, put their studies on the backburner, and themselves held a new search - for an investor in their new company, which was called Google.

Why Google?

This is derived from the word 'googol' which stands for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Sergey Brin and Larry Page chose this as they thought that was appropriate for a search engine which would seek out information from the astronomical number of possible sources contained on the Internet.

A Brightly Shining Sun They found their first investor in Andy Bechtolsheim, who was among those that founded the giant Sun Microsystems. He was impressed by what they offered, and convinced it would be a success; he immediately gave them a check for $100,000. However, the check was paid out to Google Inc., which did not yet officially exist. So the check sat on ice for a while as Sergey and Larry founded their corporation and sought out other investors to add their money into the starting pot. They were successful, and soon their available funding would near the $1 million mark. So on September 7th, 1998, Google was born; in a sublet garage in Menlo Park, California. Still in beta stage, it was nonetheless dealing with more than 10,000 searches every day, and was rapidly attracting both notice and praise from the general media and specialist publications. PC Magazine included Google in its 1998 list of the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines. Rapid Growth Google was doing well, very well, and in the space of six months their service had mushroomed by fifty fold, with now over 500,000 searches being done daily. The corporation moved home to a larger office along University Avenue in Palo Alto, and increased staff numbers to eight. They had their first commercial sign ups with Red Hat, and attracted $25 million from both of the normally competing venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers. Still growing fast in personnel and performance, Google again moved to larger premises where they remain today in Mountain View, California, in a building with the nickname, Googleplex. AOL/Netscape now joined the list of those appreciating what Google could do, as they chose this search engine ahead of all others to provide its users with the tools for web searching. By now Google searches were topping 3 million per day.

From Beta to Alpha

In September 1999, the beta label came off from their website, as the home site was officially launched. Their client list became more international as both Virgilio in Italy and Virgin Net in the United Kingdom opted for Google. This year was to bring more good news and recognition yet, as PC Magazine awarded Google a Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development. The name also appeared in many `best lists and recommendations from various sources which included the highly thought of, Time Magazine’s 1999 Top Ten Best Cybertech list.

The new millennium brought more good news for Google as Yahoo! joined the client list, but success was not going to the heads of the now around sixty folks employed at Google. Brin and Page had long cultivated an informal atmosphere among the employees, and remained true to this relaxed state. Impromptu games of roller-hockey would break out in the car park and the offices were kept free of dividing walls to the work cubicles in order to allow an openness and corporate togetherness that was free of an `in your face hierarchical structure. This was to encourage and allow the staff to propose ideas of their own, which would be embraced without jealousy if thought to be likely to succeed. Partly because of this, the search engine continued to improve, the Google Directory was to be started, using Netscape’s Open Directory Project (ODP) as a starting base and a service for those surfing the web from wireless devices like the new WAP phones.

More awards were tumbling in, like the 2000 Webby award for Best Technical Achievement and the People’s Voice Award, also in the category of Technical Achievement. Appreciating that not everyone could speak English, alternative systems of Google were developed in ten other languages, and in June 2000 Google became the largest search engine around, with 18 million searches a day and a usable index of 1 billion web listings. Later that year the index had grown to 1.3 Billion web pages and above 60 million searches each and every day were now being sent through Google.

Google on the move Innovations continued to be introduced, including the GNS (Google Number Search) for easier and faster searching on WAP phones, the Google Toolbar to download into browser software, so users would not have to visit the Google homepage to launch their search. Also, to help bring in more income, advertising with keyword focused ads. More high profile clients came in from Europe and Asia, as well as North and later, South America, and even more awards and commendations followed like PC Worlds naming of Google as the 'Best Bet Search Engine.' But it did not stop here, there was no easing off on the accelerator pedal just because the accounts were improving.

As 2001 began, the per day search number had hit 100 million, and this year would see yet more partnerships with both commercial and educational clients. The latter receiving increased search abilities for free, wherever they are in the world, as the founders of Google clearly remember where they came from and here sought to help others accordingly. Google also now started to buy a few things itself, like the enormous web archives of Deja.com, which was the largest Usenet archive on the Internet, which they started to sort, compile and merge seamlessly into their gigantic index which would grow to 3 billion web documents and pages by the end of the year.

A Profit? For a dot com?

All this and more meant that Google was actually starting to make a profit! An unheard of thing for most of the dot com bubble that was rewarding the hard work of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as the investors that had believed in their ideas coming to fruition. 2002 started with some good news held over from 2001, as that year’s Search Engine Watch Awards were handed out, with Google cleaning up, winning highest marks for the following: Best Design, Best Image Search Engine, Best Search Feature, the Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and the Outstanding Search Service. Not a Black Box, but a Yellow one. This year also brought the trial launch of the constantly updating Google News, and the Google Search Appliance: A plug-and-play device in a cheerfully bright yellow box. This hardware and associated software could allow for companies and universities to use Google to search through their own intranets, which had previously been out of bounds to the GoogleBot web crawlers because of the necessary firewall protection designed to keep out hackers and such. These also put up a wall against the search engine spider software as they roamed the net on the hunt for new and refreshed information to add the ever enlarging index, but now the advantages of Google searches would also be warmly welcomed in these previously unseen places for those on the inside. These crawlers also would learn to gather up information in new ways and forms as the year grew older, with both file type searching initially; and then image searching improved even more; with the beta launch of Google Catalogue Search that boasted an index of more than a quarter of a million images that would end the year both fully operational and enlarged, so mail order catalogs could be searched and browsed by pictures and not only by use of text. For these reasons and much more the two founders of Google are placed on the list of 'Top Ten Technological Innovators' by InfoWorld, and receive more awards as well. More international offices would be opened, in Paris, to stand alongside other overseas concerns in London, Hamburg, Toronto and Tokyo. Also reflecting the world of the World Wide Web, Google could now search in exclusively in 28, then 35 languages apart from English, with 74 languages being supported overall. A very Froogle Google Cooperation would be announced on advertising with the search engine Ask Jeeves and that year would see the keyword advertising emerge out into the world for International users in Europe and Japan, and near year’s end; the launch of Froogle, the specialist web search engine for products that better allows for the consumer to compare prices.

2003 brought along more clients, more innovation, more international use, more offices in Milan, Amsterdam and Sydney, and naturally; more searches! More and more of everything it seems, as the companies Applied Semantics and also Pyra Labs, the latter who were the developers of the self-publishing tool known as Blogger are bought up, and Google labs, where users can try out new trial versions of Google’s latest ideas attract more and more hits with ideas like Google Webquotes, which includes information about the particular sites from other related web sites. Or Google Voice Search where a phone call is all that’s needed to access Google. Other ideas include Google Sets, which provides 'sets of whatever is searched for, with each interconnected search within these sets having their own individual search links. Doing it across the Desk Version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar saw a breath of fresh air as a pop-up blocker was included, and the noble Google Compute attracts also attracts much praise, as here idle time on the users computers can be utilized for scientific research projects.

The Google Deskbar also saw the light of day in Google Labs; a download located in the Windows Taskbar, a search can be carried straight from the desktop, without first initiating a browser.

Smart Ads

The Google AdSense arrived, which offers websites intelligent advertising. This involves the automatic placing of ads in sites which contain text relevant to the products or services being advertised, so more interested clicks will be the result of this better targeting of the ads. Local services were at the forefront as 2004 came to pass, with the Local Search initiative, reminding everyone that a large world is made up of an infinite number of smaller ones.

Then came the idea of Gmail, Google’s own email accounts which are currently in the development stage, with enormous storage capacity and searchable archives rather than a filing system, it promises to be very different indeed from what people are used to from their web-based mail providers. To Share in the Success And of course, the recent news of the IPO (initial public offering) of shares as Google’s long awaited flotation on the stock markets gathers pace. Possibly as a response to Yahoo drifting away from Google as both they and

Microsoft determines to replace Google as the number 1 for search engines, it has guaranteed that it is Google that is at the heart of the headlines again. The Internet is indeed vast, but so is the determination of Google to index it and make it searchable, so that the benefits of the World Wide Web can be made more available to all.

And with every minute of every day that goes past, now in 90 different languages worldwide, more than 138,000 searches are carried out through Google technologies.

More than 200 million searches of an index that contains close to 6 billion web pages, documents, images and postings. That’s an awful lot of zeros involved in those figures, maybe not quite yet a googol, but be sure that the Google is catching up fast with it’s mathematical namesake.