Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet search and online advertising. The company had 9,378 full-time employees as of September 30, 2006, and is based in Mountain View, California. Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Eric Schmidt has been Google's chief executive officer since Larry Page stepped down.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10100 (the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). The verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

History of Google

Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

In March, 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company settled into their current home in a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, also in 1999. The complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a 1 followed by a googol of zeros). Silicon Graphics leased the buildings to Google.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users. They were attracted to its simple, uncluttered, clean design — a competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on web pages filled with visual distractions. This appearance imitated AltaVista's, but incorporated Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of hits users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.


from : en.wikipedia.org