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This page is about the Google the company for Google the search engine see Google

Google corporation (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a a U.S. based corporation, founded in 1998 that runs and manages the Google search engine. Google is headquartered (at the "Googleplex") in Mountain View, California and employs over 1,000 workers.

History

Google began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford, Ph.D. students who developed the theory that a search engine based on a mathematical analysis of the relationships between websites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. It was originally nicknamed BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant webpages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. They formally founded their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved into the somewhat notorious 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California office location, before moving to the "Googleplex" later that year.

The Google search engine gained a following among Internet users for its simple, clean design and relevant search results. Advertisements were sold by the keyword so that they would be more relevant to the end user, and the ads were text-based in order to keep page design uncluttered and fast-loading. The concept of selling Keyword advertising was originally pioneered by Overture, formerly Goto.com. While many of its dot-com siblings went under, Google quietly rose in stature while turning a profit.

In September 2001, Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was awarded a U.S. Patent. The patent was officially awarded to Leland Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading weblog-hosting website. The acquisition seemed inconsistent with the general mission of Google. However, the move secured the company's ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in Google News.

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80 percent of all search requests on the world wide web through its website and clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN. Google's share fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results.

Google's code of conduct is Don't be evil. Their site includes humorous features such as cartoon modifications of their logo for special occasions, the option to display the site in fictional or humorous languages such as Klingon and Leet, and April Fool's jokes about the company.

It is conjectured that Google's response to Yahoo will be personalized searches, using the personal data that is gathering from Orkut, Gmail and Froogle to give results based on the individual. In fact, there is a Personalized Google SearchBeta in Google Labs, the experimental sesction of Google.com.

Etymology

The name "Google" is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by a hundred zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web. It was coined by Andy Bechtolsheim who made out a check to "Google Inc."

Financing and IPO

Google's major investors are the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. In October 2003, while discussing a possible IPO (Initial Public Offering of shares), the company was approached by Microsoft about a possible partnership or merger; no such deal ever materialized.

In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. That IPO (one of the most anticipated in history) was projected to raise as much as $4 billion. According to a banker involved in the transaction, the deal would yield an estimated $12 billion market capitalization for Google.

On April 29, 2004, Google filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO to raise as much as USD $2,718,281,828 (with a touch of mathematical humor in the exact amount). The filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003.

In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, leaving Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as the joint underwriters.

After some initial stumbles, Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised $1.67 billion, of which approximately $1.2 billion went to Google. The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. The IPO gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Ironically Yahoo also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.

Google currently trades on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.

Google and the courts

A number of organizations (most controversially the Church of Scientology) have used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that Google remove references to allegedly copyrighted material on other sites. Google typically handles this by removing the link as requested and including a link to the complaint in the search results. There have also been complaints that the "Google cache" feature violates copyright. However, the consensus seems to be that caching is a normal part of the functionality of the web, and that HTTP provides adequate mechanisms for requesting that caching be disabled (which Google respects; it also honors the robots.txt file which is a mechanism to allow the owners of a site to request that part or all of their site not be included in search engine listings).

In 2002, news reports surfaced that the Google search engine had been banned in China. A mirror site (in all respects, including mirrored text) called elgooG proved useful to get around the ban. The ban was later lifted, and reports indicated that it was not Google itself that was targeted. Rather, Google's feature of a cached version of a website would allow Chinese users to circumvent any ban of a website itself, merely by visiting the cache instead. There is also a dynamic Google mirror working as a proxy server at http://www.zensur.freerk.com/google/ .

Google's efforts to refine its database has led to some legal controversy, drawing a lawsuit in October 2002 from a company, SearchKing, that sought to sell advertisements on pages with inflated Google rankings. In its defense, Google said that its rankings are its constitutionally protected opinions of the web sites that it lists. A judge threw out SearchKing's lawsuit in mid-2003 on precisely these grounds.

In late 2003 and early 2004, there were persistent rumors that Google would be sued by the SCO Group over its use of the Linux operating system, in conjunction with SCO's lawsuit against IBM over the ownership of intellectual property rights relating to Linux.

In May 2004, the Baltimore Sun interviewed Peri Fleisher, a great-niece of Edward Kasner, the mathematician whose nephew coined the word googol, who said Kasner's descendants were "exploring" legal action against Google due to its name.

Corporate culture

Philosophy

Google is known for its relaxed corporate culture, reminiscent of the Dot-com boom. Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual aspects including, "You can make money without doing evil", "You can be serious without a suit" and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." A complete list of corporate fundamentals is available on Google's web site . The company encourages equality along the corporate levels and tells it's employees to work on a personal project one day a week. Twice a week there is a roller hockey game in the company parking lot.

Googleplex

The Googleplex's lobby (Google headquarters) is decorated with a piano, lava lamps and a real time projection of current search queries. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has a Linux OS workstations and access to the corporate recreation center. The recreation center includes a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, Foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table and ping pong. In addition to the rec room there are snack rooms stocked with various cereals, gummy bears, M&Ms, toffee, licorice, cashew nuts, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda and make-your-own cappuccino.

IPO and culture

Products and services

Google

Google’s most famous creation is the Google search engine. Google.com has indexed 4.28 billion websites, has 200 million request a day and is the largest search engine on the internet.

Google Browser

After Google registered "gbrowser.com" speculation began that it plans to release an internet browser to compete with Internet Explorer. Executives have been secretive about whether they intend to develop a browser. A spokesman hinted that, " in reinventing the wheel with respect to browser technologies." Google has recently hired Adam Bosworth, a Microsoft former employee who helped write Internet Explorer, and Joe Beda, the man who has been working on Microsoft's next generation graphics engine. Further speculation involves google modifying either Netscape or Mozilla Firefox browsers.

Google Desktop Search

Formally known under the codename Puffin, Google Desktop Search runs locally on a PC and will index all Microsoft Outlook & Outlook Express emails, text documents, Microsoft Office documents, AOL Instant Messenger conversations and the the Internet Explorer history on that PC and allow the user to search them from a browser. Google Desktop Search is an extension of Google Search. After indexing your files, your local results will turn up on normal Google search on your local computer.

Google Desktop Search does not store your files on the web and your personal information is not sent to Google.

Google Desktop Search was likely developed in response to file and Web search capabilities that will be offered in the next major release of Microsoft Windows, codenamed Longhorn (slated for release in 2006) — features that directly compete with Google's core Internet search business.

Currently, the beta version of Google Desktop Search does not support Google's "Did You Mean" feature. If you let it look up your computer for "chicke," it will not ask did you mean "chicken?"

Orkut

Though not mentioned on the Google homepage, Orkut is a service hosted, created and maintained by Google engineers. Orkut is a social networking service, where users can list their personal and professional information, create relationships amongst friends and join communities of mutual interest.

There is some speculation saying that Orkut and Gmail are part of a Google effort to gather information about their users, with the intention of offering a better personalized search service in future. Google already has a personalized search in Google Labs.

Blogger

In 2003, Google acquired the Pyra Labs and Blogger services. Formerly premium features that needed to be paid for were made available for free by Google.

The tool, Blogger, is a service to make weblog publishing easier. The user does not have to write any code or worry about installing server software or scripts. Nevertheless, the user can influence the design of his blog freely.

Picasa

On July 13, 2004 Google acquired Picasa, a software for management and sharing of digital photographs. Picasa has also been integrated with Google's Blogger. It is currently free.

• Google