Google began in January 1996 as a
research project by Larry Page and
Sergey Brin when they were both PhD
students at Stanford University in California.[28] While conventional search engines
ranked results by counting how many
times the search terms appeared on
the page, the two theorized about a
better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[29] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the
number of pages, and the importance
of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[30][31] A small search engine called
"RankDex" from IDD Information
Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar
strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[32] The technology in RankDex would be patented [33] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[34][35] Page and Brin originally nicknamed
their new search engine "BackRub",
because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[36][37][38] Eventually, they changed the name to
Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[39][40] the number one followed by one hundred
zeros, which was picked to signify that
the search engine wants to provide
large quantities of information for people.[41] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website,
with the domain google.stanford.edu.[42] The domain name for Google was
registered on September 15, 1997,[43] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It
was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki[28]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow
PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[28][44][45] In May 2011, unique visitors of Google
surpassed 1 billion mark for the first
time, an 8.4 percent increase from a
year ago with 931 million unique visitors.[46] Financing and initial public offering The first funding for
Google was an August
1998 contribution of
US$100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co- founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was even incorporated.[48] Early in 1999, while still
graduate students, Brin
and Page decided that
the search engine they
had developed was
taking up too much of their time from
academic pursuits.
They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered
to sell it to him for
$1 million. He rejected
the offer, and later
criticized Vinod Khosla , one of Excite's venture
capitalists, after he had
negotiated Brin and
Page down to
$750,000. On June 7,
1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced,[49] with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[48] Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August
19, 2004. The company offered
19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[50][51] Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a
system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[52][53] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[54] The vast majority of the 271 million shares
remained under the control of Google,
and many Google employees became
instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited
because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.[55] Some people speculated that Google's
IPO would inevitably lead to changes
in company culture. Reasons ranged
from shareholder pressure for
employee benefit reductions to the
fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires.[56] As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page promised in a report to
potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.[57] In 2005, however, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[58] [59][60] In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google
designated a Chief Culture Officer, who
also serves as the Director of Human
Resources. The purpose of the Chief
Culture Officer is to develop and
maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values
that the company was founded on: a
flat organization with a collaborative environment.[61] Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[62] [63] The stock's performance after the IPO
went well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007,[64] primarily because of strong sales and
earnings in the online advertising market.[65] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual
investors, as opposed to large
institutional investors and mutual funds.[65] The company is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
