Google, the leading search engine worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergei Brin.
With the encouragement of fellow Stanford alum David Filo, who started Yahoo a few years earlier, Page and Brin decided to start a company and started looking for investors to back them. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000 in the company after receiving a demo of their search technology. Eventually they raised over $1M.
Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998 in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Page and Brin hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, who was later to become Google's Director of Technology.
By 1999, it was serving 500,000 queries a day and the company moved from the unassuming four walls of a garage to the now mega Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Their audience continued to grow along with their reputation for effectiveness, relevance, speed and reliability.
In 2000, Google replaced Yahoo's own internal search engine as the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. Now, with more than 50% share of the total search market, Google provides search results for numerous search engines on the web.
In 2006 Google was added to the Oxford English dictionary as a verb – the verb “to g oogle” has become so popular that Google has even been worried that their brand name might lose their copyright and patent protections, and allow other companies to be able to legally use the Google brand in their own brand.
Today Google has a dominant controlling share of the search market. Google is the most widely used search engine on the internet with a 54% market share. Yahoo! Is Google’s closest rival with 23%, less than half of Google’s share, and MSN even falls far short of Yahoo!, lagging far behind in 3rd place with a 13% market share. If these figures aren’t impressive enough for Google, independent estimates say that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google – Google receives about a billion search requests per day – and with estimates that Google makes 12 cents for every search you perform, you can see that Google corporation is a very lucrative business!
