 | |
| 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: |  @google
|
| 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]
History
Origins of Google
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
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]
Timeline: 2000-present
In 2000, Google is already available in different languages which include French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish,[9] Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. [10] 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.[11]