Google (the company)

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

WhatIs.com

Google is a multinational, publicly-traded organization built around the company's

hugely popular search engine. Google's other enterprises include Internet
analytics, cloud computing, advertising technologies, and Web app, browser and
operating system development.
Google's roots go back to 1995 when two graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry
Page, met at Stanford University. In 1996, Brin and Page collaborated on a research
project that was to eventually become the Google search engine. BackRub, as it was
called then (because of its analysis of back links), stirred up interest in the university
research community, but didn't garner any offers from the major portal vendors. Those
were early days in terms of mass searching of the Internet; one of the CEOs who turned
them away said that users don't really care about search abilities. Undaunted, the
founders scrounged up enough funding to get started, and in September of 1998 began
operations from a garage-based office in Menlo Park, California. In December of that
same year, PC Magazine listed Google as one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search
Engines for 1998.

Google was chosen for its resemblance to the word googol -- a number consisting of a
numeral one followed by a hundred zeroes -- as a reference to the vast amount of
information in the world. Google's self-stated mission: "to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful."

In the first few years of operation, Google's search engine competition included
AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite and Lycos. Within a few years, however, Google became so
dominant that the name has become a verb meaning to conduct a Web search; people
are as likely to say they "Googled" some information as to say they searched for it.

Google's headquarters are in Mountainview, California.