Google began in 1996 as a research project by two college students in California. Google was founded in 1998 by two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.The search engine was originally called “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. After time, they changed the name to “Google”, where it originally ran under Stanford University’s website. Google is a technology company that includes online advertising, searching, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Together, Page and Brin, control 56 percent of stockholder voting power and about 14 percent of its shares. They started google as a private company in 1998 and went on to make it a public IPO in 2004.
Google was initially funded with a contribution of $100,000 in 1998, by Andy
Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Microsystems. Google also received investments from three other investors, Jeff Bezos, David Cheriton, and Ram Shiram. They also received a few smaller investments from 1998-1999 receiving a grand total of about $25 million in June of 1999. In early 1999, Page and Brin decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite for $1 million and were rejected. They even brought down the price to $750,000, but were still rejected.
At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. With the sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Its market
capitalization grew to about 397 billion dollars in 2014. Majority of the 271 million shares
remained under the control of the Google company, and majority Google employees became
instant paper millionaires. Google’s main competitor, Yahoo!, also benefitted from Google’s
success because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO even began to take place.
Google grew extremely rapidly and its growth has made for many chains of new products and partnerships. Some of these include Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Pages, Google Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Translate, and much more. It has also grown into a navigation system, including Google Maps, Google Earth, and Waze. It also partnered with the video sharing system, YouTube.
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to the home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups, Palo Alto California. In 2001, Google received a patent for its Page Rank mechanism, which was officially assigned to Stanford University and it listed
Lawrence Page as Google’s inventor. After outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, in 2003. The complex became known as the
Googleplex. Three years later, Google bought the property from Silicon Graphics for
$319 million. The Washington Post reported on a 700 percent increase in third-quarter profit for Google, in 2005, due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet. In 2009, CNN made a report about political searches,
and concluded that "more than a billion searches" are being typed into Google on a daily basis. The number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010, in May 2011. The year 2012 was the first time that Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue, which completely surpassed the $38 billion that was generated the previous year in 2011.
With a $38.8 million dollar investment in 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company had announced that the two locations were predicted to generate 169.5 megawatts of power, which would potentially be enough to supply 55,000 homes. Developed by NextEra Energy Resources, the were predicted to reduce fossil fuel use in the region and return profits. Also in 2010, Google purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norwegian company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other services related to the topic of teleconferencing. This enabled Google to create a sort of telephone style services to its list of products. The Globe and Mail reported that Google bid $900 million for 6000 Nortel Networks patents, in April of 2011. Google made its largest-ever acquisition to-date when it announced that it would take over Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in August of 2011. In June 2013, Google acquired Waze (a navigation app), with $966 million deal. As Waze remained an independent entity, its social features, were reportedly valuable integrations between Waze and Google Maps, Google's own mapping service.
In recent years, Google has made it a mission to venture into creating a new era of technology, investing in projects ranging from self-driving cars to artificial intelligence. Google has released smartphones, devices such as Google Home, where the world doesn’t have to be by your fingertips but simply by your voice, and creating a new chapter in virtual reality, such as Google glasses. Due to the never-ending advancements in technology, Google is aiming big to change the world as we know it. Projects discussed have included an elevator to space and having access to wifi anywhere in the world via blimp. While these sound unimaginable, only time will tell. Google thrives off of making people’s lives easier and will stop at nothing to ensure that they are the powerhouse of the technological world. These major projects will soon be available down the road, and eventually there will be no more people driving cars, robots will be real (and hopefully not take over the world), and families can take a vacation to Outer Space. If Page and Brinn were to tell people they can achieve this 20 years ago, they probably would have been laughed at and ridiculed but now it looks more and more like reality. Technology is everywhere we go and there is no avoiding it. What makes Google special is that they go above and beyond in revolutionizing this.
Google also invests in companies that they feel will further the success of the company. They look for five traits in these companies that include dependability, structure, meaning, impact, and safety. Google also helps further other companies. We have all accidentally clicked on something we didn’t mean to and it will take us to another page and advertise something. This software application, DoubleClick, can be taken down for a fee, furthering the income Google can make.
Google is one of the most wanted jobs to have in the world and this should not be a surprise. Google’s average starting salary is six figures, not to mention the perks of coming with it. Many wish they can spend everyday in the Google headquarters in California, also known as Googleplex, a state of the art facility that allows you to nap, exercise, and interact with your coworkers more than you actually work. Despite all the free time employees have on their hands, they still make Google a success.