by Ikaros Marks

Created on: May 12, 2009   Last Updated: May 15, 2009

Search engines have permeated the internet for ages. One seems to always have a need to find something on the internet and what better way to find it than through a site search. Early search engine algorithms were bulky and they didn't seek to spider the entire internet, but preferred sticking to a set of sites that would come to be known as their cloud.

In January 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD research students at the Stanford University in California, took steps that would change the world. Working on the hypothesis that if a search engine analyzed the relationship between websites, it would produce a better, more relevant set of results for the search term, the students developed a search engine nicknamed "BackRub" because of its use of back-links to check for relationships.

Originally, the BackRub server was based in Stanford University, but needed to be relocated after complaints about the high bandwidth usage of the server. The original domain name used was google.stanford.edu but in September 1997, they registered the domain name google.com and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. in September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

In March of 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, joining the migration of the Silicon Valley start-ups. They quickly outgrew the first two locations they chose for their offices and finally settled on a complex of buildings (colloquially termed "The Googleplex" today) for the site of their permanent offices. In 2006, Google purchased the complex after having leased it from 1999 to 2006.

Google's simple design and accurate results allowed it to flourish after many of its competitors in the startup game had since fallen by the wayside. The search engine developed a loyal fan-base and soon they expanded into other areas. One of the most recognizable of these is Google-Ads. First developed as a way of capitalizing on the search words entered into the engine as a means of direct marketing, the ads grew and became interlinked with another Google product, Ad-Sense. Together these generate large amounts of income for both advertisers and Google themselves.

Over time, Google has acquired many of their former rivals as well as other companies in their growth:

In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc., which developed a product called Earth Viewer which was renamed in 2005 to Google Earth. In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog statistics application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled. The last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on 6 April 2006 and outlined many of the known issues of the service. In late 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. Shortly after, on 31 October 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. On 13 April 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed to buy the company for US$3.1 billion. On 2 July 2007, Google purchased GrandCentral. Google agreed to buy the company for US$50 million. On 9 July 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.

In addition to these acquisitions (and in some cases, a result thereof), Google has ventured into the world of application production, with recognizable products such as:

Google Earth

Google Chrome

Google Video

Google Maps

Picasa

SketchUp

Google Mail (gmail)

The list is too numerous and there is no end in sight. Google continues to push the envelope on being the complete internet resource.

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