One student was assigned to show another new guy around the college campus at Stanford University. On their first meeting, they disagreed about almost everything. But by the end of the year, they had decided to do a project together. From their dorm rooms, they built a search engine as a research project. That is the humble beginning of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their Google.
They started on a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The pair built a server network using cheap, used and borrowed personal computers. And this all in a competitive environment where other dozen odd companies were attempting a search engine like Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos, MSN and others.
The search engine was unique in that it used a technology they developed called PageRank, which determined a website’s relevance by taking into account the number of pages, along with the importance of the pages, that linked back to the original site. While other websites sought search functions as an additional feature, till today Google provides the Search bar as its main service.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, after a quick demo of Google, wrote them a cheque, though Google as a legal entity did not exist yet.With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and now CEO of YouTube).
The name Google too has an interesting history. They mean to keep it Googlol, which means 10 to power hundred. Google was a typo written on the cheque SUN gave them, timid to ask them to correct it, they named company as Google and encashed the cheque. And now it has become a part of our daily lives. Anything we don’t know, whatever we need, we just Google it.
What is fascinating about the Google story is that the search engine giant draws a majority of its revenue from AdWords. The bulk of Google’s $75 billion revenue came from its proprietary advertising service, Google AdWords. Of that revenue, over 77% from Google’s own websites.
In 19 years, Google has come a long way from that garage. It has become a basic necessity for most urbane populace. And we have reached a stage where we cannot imagine life without it.
So, if a garage venture could become one of the youngest billionaires in the world at the mere age of 19, there must already be a pair of geeks working hard in a garage somewhere, and they could easily be the next Google.
