Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2010. Craig Silverstein is described as Google’s current director of technology (he left Google in 2012), and the daily visit figure is a 2010 estimate.
Google is currently the company that makes the most profit in the world. It is built mainly on offering its users a range of free services, and it earns most of its profits from advertising. Like any company, the internet giant had a tough start, but that didn’t stop it from becoming, within a decade, the biggest company in new technology.
In 1995, Stanford University held an event for prospective computer science PhD students. That’s where Larry Page (24), an electrical engineering graduate with experience in web design, met Sergey Brin (23), who had a degree in computer science and mathematics.
That same year they began building a data search algorithm, which today is the technology at the heart of Google.
Larry Page gave the technology his name, calling it “PageRank”. It gives web pages more or less importance depending on the links pointing to them (backlinks). Hence the project’s original name, BackRub.
In 1997, Larry and Sergey registered the domain “google.com” and presented their technology to Stanford, which tried to contact internet companies to promote Google. By then it already had more than 20 million web pages indexed on hard drives that were starting to run out of space.
In 1998, Sergey and Larry decided to start their own company, as they couldn’t find buyers for their technology. That’s when Google got its first registered address: the garage of Larry’s house. They made their first investment, $18,000, on a server and several hard drives that were high-capacity for the time. The money came out of their own pockets, since they still couldn’t find anyone willing to join or fund the project.
That same year they met Andy Bechtolsheim (vice president at Cisco Systems), who saw a future in the Google project and wanted to be part of it somehow. Andy wrote Google a cheque for $100,000, and later contributed more money.
Google hired its first employee, Craig Silverstein, who is now Google’s director of technology.
In 1999, Google was answering 700,000 queries a day, so they hired five more people and signed their first commercial contract, with Red Hat.
From then on, Google’s success became unstoppable.
Business deals and countless acquisitions of web services followed. They launched an aggressive advertising push, giving much more in services and asking much less in return.
It is estimated that Google receives more than 450 million visits a day across its products and services.
I’m sure many of the investors and companies that were offered Google while the idea was being developed must be tearing their hair out today, seeing how successful these two young men became.
Further reading
- The beginnings of Apple
- Donald Trump and the entrepreneurial mindset
- How to start a business with no money
- How to finance my business
- The 10 jobs of the future
Featured image: Ehud Kenan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
