Ten years of Google

How did one company become such a part of our lives, so fast? By Robert Colvile

A decade ago, two graduate students from Stanford University in California sat in a Burger King, having breakfast. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were celebrating, albeit frugally: their plan to turn a novel technique for mapping the internet into a business had attracted its first $100,000 of funding. The payee's name on the cheque - the name of the company they would formally found on September 7, 1998 - had been agreed that morning: "Google, Inc".

Nowadays, if they wanted to treat themselves, Page and Brin could probably just buy Burger King. Their start-up has become a multi-billion-dollar, era-defining colossus. More than three quarters of online searches in Britain go through Google, 100 million queries a day. To Google is not just a verb, but a lifestyle, a gateway to an unprecedented hoard of information.

Google succeeded for one simple reason: it, more than any other site, found you what you were looking for. At the time, the internet was exploding in size. The dominant site, Yahoo, offered a manually updated directory, and was being swamped. Other search engines, such as AltaVista, could map the web, but had problems sorting the results.

Page and Brin had two big ideas. The first was PageRank - treating the number of times a site was linked to as a rough measure of its authority. The second was to automate the process to cope with the increasing number of sites. Humans would tinker with the algorithm, but never the results. These both worked brilliantly - but Google still had its fair share of luck. Stanford tolerated the enormous demand for data of that initial graduate experiment, BackRub, and the complaints of those whose sites it indexed; the firm went to the market before the first internet bubble burst; and, vitally, its rivals did not realise how important search would become.

"That people were concentrating on other things was crucial," recalls Craig Silverstein, the college friend who was the first to join Page and Brin. "It's very possible that if someone had been truly interested in our technology, we would have just sold to them." Going it alone was a risk. "We recognised that a lot of companies don't make it," adds Silverstein, now Google's director of technology. "The venture capitalists tried to scare us, saying that 80 per cent of start-ups fail. Larry shot back with: 'Yes, but most of those are restaurants.'?"

That Google survived - and, as word of mouth built, came to dominate the industry - was down to its technology, both the strength of Page and Brin's original ideas and the way they came to employ vast fields of interlinked computers to handle the increasing size and sophistication of the web. But what brought in the billions was advertising. Rather than bombarding people with adverts they might or might not want, Google could catch them at the moment they considered a purchase, and line up the appropriate text ads. So Alice Bowe, a garden designer, can pay Google so that whenever anyone within 50 miles of her home types "garden design", her site gets a mention. "I knew nothing about computers, or any of that sort of thing," she explains. "I did a three-month business course, but that just taught me how to add up and file a tax return. But it's really easy. You can type in as many different versions of the ad, and it will automatically try them out, then show the ones that do best more often."

Thanks to the likes of Alice, Google is at the heart of an entire ecosystem of businesses. Alongside the adverts are the consultants who promise to push your site up the search rankings, or nudge negative coverage off the all-important first page of results. Its search and ads businesses bring Google not just profit, but power - if its algorithms demote your site, your visitors and your revenue will plunge.

But this is not what makes Google so fascinating. From its California headquarters, the Googleplex, emanates what its first historian, John Battelle, author of The Search, calls an "extraordinary cultural aura… a whiff of the mysterious and the holy". It is, according to Fortune magazine, the best place in the world to work: it recruits the best and the brightest; it gives them free food and wonderful surroundings and a day a week to pursue their interests; it puts doodles on its logo and plays April Fool's jokes; and it explicitly orders its staff: "Don't be evil."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main....6/dlgoog106.xml

I read an article about this the other day and found the ten year timeline from google very interesting. It is truely amazing the scale it has grown to.

Just for today you`ll see the Queen`s head in the word Google on their UK site. That`s because she visited the Google offices today.

http://www.google.co.uk/