The History About The Internet And Communication

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The two founders of Google and Google Inc. are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They met in 1994 while both were attending Stanford University. At the time they met, Brin was only 21 years old and Page was only 22. They were graduate students at Stanford University in the computer science field in 1995. At the start of 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin began to work on a search engine named Backrub. They gave the engine this name due to its ability to analyze the back links that points to a given website. Page's interest and curiosity in the inner workings of the World Wide Web and Brin's strong background in computer and mathematics skills led to their collective creation of another program called a Web crawler, which analyzed how Web sites link together to each other. This technology allowed Brin and Page to rank a given Web site based on the significance of other pages that link to it and is now the core for how modern search engines work.

Skipping ahead to 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept working nonstop to make their search technology as perfect as they could possibly make it. They purchased a total of one terabyte of disk memory at low bargain prices to continue working. Then, they built their own computer data center in Larry's Page's university dorm room. The data center in Page’s dorm room would later become Google’s first data storage center. While still continuing work on the Google search engine Brin had opened up to the idea to find potential partners or investors that might want to license a search engine technology that was better than any others that were currently available. Page and Brin were unable to interest any of the major portal companies and they ultimately decided to go for their venture alone. In November of 1998, both Brin and Page dropped out of Stanford to set out and create something even more ambitious which would eventually become Google.

The two computer science majors came up with the name Google from a brainstorming session. The used the word Google as a derivative of the word "googol," which is a math term that was coined by Milton Sirotta in 19398 that stands for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The two determined entrepreneurs felt that it represented their mission of wanting to organize the limitless amount of information that was available on the internet.

One day Page and Brin came across a man named Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim is one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He took one look at the demo of Google that Page and Brin had created and he knew it had a lot of potential. At the time Bechtolsheim was in a rush, so since he liked what he saw he wrote Page and Brin a check for one thousand dollars. Unfortunately since there was no legit company known as "Google Inc." yet they couldn't deposit the check. They held on to it while they scrambled to set up the corporation. While looking for funding there total investment was already nearing one million dollars.

On September 7th, 1998, Google Inc. opened its first home. It was a space attached to a friend of Brin’s garage. Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired and was named Google’s director of technology. Still in beta at the time Google.com was growing and answering more than 10,000 search queries every day. The media soon began to notice the new search engine and by the end of 1998 PC magazine named Google.com one of its top 100 search engines and web sites. Within the first months of 1999 Google had grown substantially larger and had to move from its small garage to an office in Palo Alto, a city south of San Francisco, CA. At this time Google Inc. had eight employees and the search engine was answering more than five hundred thousand queries per day. It was then with Google growing more and more companies became very interested in the service.

Google had begun to encounter issues again with limited space so they alleviated that problem with a move to their current corporate headquarters located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. In early 2000, both America Online (AOL) and Netscape decided to use Google as there web engine search provider. By doing so AOL and Netscape pushed traffic levels past three million searches per day.

In late 2000 Google enhanced its user's power by allowing users to search anywhere on the World Wide Web. Google facilitated this by introducing the Google Toolbar. Google Toolbar 1.0 was the first browsing toolbar, released on December 11th, 2000. In this debut version, users along with highlighting search terms in a specific color, users could from any web page directly access the Google search functionality. As it stands now the Google Toolbar has gone through 7 major updates and has become compatible for every major browser including Internet Explorer and Firefox. Along the way Google has included such features as a personalized homepage in version 2, instant suggestions in version 4, auto fill in version 5, a quick search box in version 6 and major new features and improvements in the latest version 7 release in 2012.

Towards the end of 2000, Google was handling over a hundred million search queries a day. That still wasn't enough for the employees of Google because they were still researching new exciting ways to connect people with the information that they needed and searched. As Google saw there global audience of users continue to grow, they noticed a lot of differing search queries. By noticing these queries Google noticed where humanity's mind was at. Google sat down and sorted through countless numbers of keywords and captured the top searches and came up with the Google zeitgeist. Google’s definition of the Google zeitgeist is "a showcase of rising and falling of stars in the search firmament as places and names flicker from insignificance to center stage and then fade back again." Over the next few years to come, Google’s capabilities multiplied even more down to the company's financial footing which became even more secure. Toward the beginning of the fourth quarter in 2001, Google announced that they had discovered what a lot of other online company's couldn't and that's "profitability".

With Google becoming one of the wealthiest and most successful companies all from its Google search engine, the company soon began to buy up smaller start-up companies in hopes of starting new ventures and entering new areas of technology. One example of this is Android mobile operating system. Android Inc. was a company founded by Andy Rubin who is now the director of mobile platforms at Google. In 2005 Google bought Android Inc. which a Linux based mobile operating systems that was designed for smart phones and tablets. On November 5th, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a group of technology companies including Google, HTC and Samsung, wireless providers such as T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel, and chipset designers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, was unveiled with a goal to develop completely open standards for mobile devices and mobile device operating systems. That day, the Android OS was unveiled as its first product along with an initial showing of the HTC Dream which would be the first commercially available phone released to the public to run the Android OS. Less than a year later on October 22nd, 2008, the HTC Dream was released to the public. To date the Android OS has gone through many updates and revisions. Starting with Android Beta in November 2007 and jumping to version 1.0 in September 2008. Google has had a knack for using deserts for its Android update codenames along with being alphabetical. Starting after version 1.1 Google jumped to 1.5 which was codenamed Cupcake on April 29th, 2009. Next with version 1.6 was codenamed Donut on September 16th, 2009. A little more than a month later Android jumped to version 2.0 codenamed Éclair on October 29th, 2009. Next for two smaller updates Google chose the codename Froyo for version 2.2 and Gingerbread on version 2.3, respectively in May and December of 2010. Version 3.0 was a very big release for the Android OS in February 2011 as it was the first tablet only update and it was named Honeycomb. Later in December of 2011 Google released Android 4.0 named Ice Cream Sandwich which was the last official version to support Adobe Systems Flash player. Google has now moved onto its current version of the Android OS named Jellybean which was released July 2012. From here Google is expected to release Android 5.0, Key Lime Pie sometime in the second quarter of 2013. Android OS has gathered quite a following on its way to securing more than half of the market share from the worldwide smartphone market. As of January 2013, more than 750 million devices have been activated using the Android OS which include more than 1.5 million activations every day. Also apart from developing its own mobile operating system Google has also developed and released its own brand of smartphones and tablets under the Nexus name.

Another example of Google’s ventures outside of its search engine is Google’s very own browser, Chrome. On August 18, 2008 Google released its first official Chrome Web browser with a beta release on the Android mobile operating system. Google Chrome’s tech lead, Ben Goodger, is known best for assembling the web browser Firefox. In 2005, Goodger was hired by Google to strengthen its own browser software and eventually fully create a browser for the modern day World Wide Web. Aside from Goodger, Google also hired some of the top Firefox developers in 2005 and in 2006 the newly formed team began to work on a new browser to be designed to be always-on, broadband-connected, and incorporate web applications such as Google Maps or GMail. Due to Google Chrome being a fresh start browser instead of others browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Apple Safari it was possible to add features that are difficult to add within existing models. These features such as task monitoring and tab isolation are among the first features which set Chrome apart from other browsers. On September 2nd, 2008 Google released the first official version of Chrome. Throughout every major release of Chrome Google has tried to also continually update its WebKit and JavaScript engines. Starting with release version 2.1, Google has steadily updated Chrome each year and now as of March 28th, 2013 Google Chrome has moved all the way to version 26. Along the way of releasing Chrome for Windows based computers Google has also released versions for Mac OS, iOS, Android and other operating systems. At the time of its first release in 2008 Chrome had a 1% market share on worldwide usage share of web browsers. As it stands now Chrome holds a 37% market share among browsers meaning it is the most widely used internet browser in the world with Internet Explorer and Firefox behind it.