Inspiring Success Story of Google

Google is one of the world’s most successful technology companies.

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

About Larry Page–

Larry Page was born to Carl Victor Page, Sr. and Gloria on March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan, United States of America.

Both his parents were computer science professors in Michigan State University.

His father, Carl Victor Page, Sr. was an innovator in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science.

And his mother, Gloria used to teach computer programming.

Larry Page used to find many gadgets and magazines related to computers in his home.

As he was brought up in this environment, he eventually gained interest in the computers.

Larry Page was a very curious kid and used to open up the gadgets to know their mechanism of working.

Once in an interview, he said that since his childhood he knew that one day he will grow up to become an entrepreneur and will invent something utile.

When Larry Page was of around 12 years of age, he decided to become a businessman in the future and this thought sparked him to learn about businesses.

Education-

Larry Page attended the Okemos Montessori School.

And he graduated in Computer engineering from the University of Michigan.

Later, Larry Page did his post-graduation from Stanford University and he also got enrolled for the PhD in the same university.

During his PhD, he met Sergey Brin at a research project.

Later, these two people together changed the face of the technology industry.

About Sergey Brin –

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973 to Eugenia and Mikhail Brin in Moscow, Russia.

His father was a mathematics professor at University of Maryland and his mother was a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose World Wide Web as their research topic for their PhD study.

Birth of Google-

Sergey Brin and Larry Page worked hard for four years to develop an algorithm, which links all the websites on the internet.

Basically, Google was started with a mission to organise all the information in the world and to make that collected information easily accessible to each and every one by using the power of technology.

They finally succeeded in developing this amazing algorithm in September 1996.

This algorithm was named as PageRank and was used to assign page ranks based on the popularity of the websites.

Their search engine listed the web results in order of their popularity, the most popular results showed at the top of the search results, because the most popular results will probably be the most useful results.

They initially named their search engine as BackRub, but later changed its name to Google, by misspelling googol.

As vast as an ocean-

Googol is a mathematical term which can be represented by placing number one followed by a hundred zeroes.

The main concept of their search engine was to provide as much data as possible to the users.

So, they wanted to name the search engine as googol, as googol indicates a very big number, which reflected their mission of developing a search engine, googol which displays a vast amount of data.

But they misspelled it as Google.

Initially, Google was a part of the website of Stanford University.

Finally, google.com domain name was registered on September 15, 1997.

And then, they raised one million dollars from their families, friends and the investors.

Starting in a garage-

On September 4, 1998, Google was founded in a garage of their friend, Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California, United States.

Susan Wojcicki is Google’s first marketing manager and currently she serves as the CEO of YouTube.

Becoming billionaires-

During those times, Yahoo was a giant and almost each and every one relied on their search engine.

The co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page offered Yahoo to sell the algorithms of Google for one million dollars.

Because they thought that it was too early for them to venture into business and instead they wanted to allocate their full time and focus on their education at Stanford University.

But Yahoo rejected their offer.

And for the second time, in 2002, Yahoo once again got a chance to acquire Google for a sum of five billion dollars.

But Yahoo wanted Google for three billion dollars.

Yahoo for the second time missed a golden chance of acquiring Google.

After these rejections, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to run Google on their own.

Yahoo has lost the search engine game to Google a very long time ago.

Now, on an average Google receives over 40,000 searches per second.

First funding-

Google received its first funding of 1,00,000 dollars from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

And in 1998, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and David Cheriton, a professor of computer science at Harvard University also invested in Google.

Never looking back again-

The eventual global success of Google can be attributed to its unique algorithm.

On 19^th August 2004, Google’s held its first Initial public offering.

This offering was a huge success and Google reaped huge investments.

This made Larry Page and Sergey Brin one of the youngest billionaires.

In September 2013, Larry Page was ranked as the thirteenth richest person in America in The Forbes 400 list.

During the same year in the month of October, Larry Page was the number 17^th in the Forbes most powerful people list.

And by the age of 25 the co-founders of Google became millionaires and they became billionaires at the age of 30.

And now Google is the biggest internet company in the world.

Biggest advertising company –

In addition to being a search engine, Google is also an advertising company.

And now, the majority of its revenue (more than 70 percent) is generated through advertising alone.

Acquisitions-

In April 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, a company which specialized in developing software related to online advertising.

The technology utilised in the Google AdSense technology is developed by Applied Semantics.

Google also acquired Android in July 2005 for 50 million dollars.

Now, Android powers around 70.16% of the mobile devices across the world.

On 13 November 2006, Google bought YouTube, now the world’s most favourite video platform for 1.65 billion dollars.

Google had also acquired AdMob in November 2009 for 750 million dollars.

The services of AdMob are used to display ads in the Google Play applications; this enables the developers of the applications and Google to earn revenue.

Some great offerings-

Google also offers many great products like Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Translate, Google Maps, Google AdSense, Google Ads, Google Docs and Blogger, etc.

On 10^th August 2015, the co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the creation of a new parent company, Alphabet Inc.

This came into effect from 2^nd October 2015 and now Alphabet Inc. is the parent company of Google.

Larry Page is the former CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Sergey Brin is the former president of Alphabet Inc.

The current CEO of Alphabet Inc. is Sundar Pichai.

Now, Alphabet employs more than 135,300 people.

Philanthropy-

Google also runs a non-profit organisation, by name Google.org.

This organisation concentrates on developing renewable energies, reducing poverty and providing education to masses.

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Featured image credit- Wikimedia Commons