Google

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
Revenue:	$ 29, 321 million as of 2009
Website:	www.google.com
Blog:	Google Blogspot
Facebook:	Google Facebook
LinkedIn:	Google
Twitter:	@google
Key People
Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman Sergey Brin, Co-Founder Nikesh Arora, Senior VP and Chief Business Officer Shona L. Brown, Senior VP Business Operations David C. Drummond, Senior VP, Corporate Devt. & Chief Legal Officer Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering and Research Patrick Pichette, Senior VP & Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP Product Management

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 The company ranked 4th on Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2011.

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.

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. 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

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.

Timeline: 2000-2005

In 2000, Google is already available in different languages which include French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 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.

In 2001, Google is already available in 26 languages, Eric Schmidt was appointed Chairman and Wayne Rosing was hired as VP for Engineering. The following year, Schmidt was elected CEO while Page assumed the position of president for products and Brin became president for technology. Google opened its first international office in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2002, Google and AOL inked partnership, the company also launched the Google Search Appliance,new device that will allow corporations to use its search technology to scan their own networks, Adwords Select, an enhanced version of Adwords was released, a self-service advertising system with the Cost-Per Click (CPC)feature, the First Google API which enables developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and programs in their favorite environments, and the Google Labs. The Google News and Froogle was also launched and the company's office in Australia was opened.

The American Dialect Society announced on January 13, 2003 that google was voted by its members as the most useful Word of the Year for 2002. Goodle Adsense, Google Grants and Google Print were released.

Google's Initial Public Offering (IPO) was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2004. During the same year, company also released Google Orkut, Google Local Gmail, SMS for mobile, Google Desktop search and Google Scholar were released.The Tokyo R & D Center was opened and the search index reach 8 billion.

DARPA scientist Vinton Cerf joined Google on October 3, 2005 as Chief Internet Evangelist and Dr. Kaifu Lee as head of the Google's China R & D Center.<ref.sfgate.com</ref> The company also opened its offices in Sao Paolo and Mexico City and numerous products were released such as Google Analytics, Google Transit, Google Reader and many other products.