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Google Inc. (NASDAQ:
GOOGLE and LSE: GGEA) is an American public corporation,
specializing in Internet searching and online advertising.
The company is based in Mountain View, California, and
has 12,238 full-time employees (as of March 31, 2007).[2]
Google's mission statement is, "to organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful."[3] Google's corporate philosophy includes
statements such as "Don't be evil", and "Work
should be challenging and the challenge should be fun",
illustrating a somewhat relaxed corporate culture. |
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
while they were students at Stanford University and
the company was first incorporated as a privately
held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial
public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising
$1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion. Through
a series of new product developments, acquisitions
and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial
search and advertising business into other areas,
including web-based email, online mapping, office
productivity, and video sharing, among others.
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Like most large corporations, Google's businesses
have drawn some controversy, such as copyright disputes
in its book search project, or censorship by Google
of search results as it works with countries such
as France, Germany, and China -- each of whom have
laws requiring the company hide information from Google
users in their country. Additionally, in the post
September 11 era, several governments and militaries
have raised concerns about the national security risks
posed by vivid geographic details provided by Google
Earth's satellite imaging. However, it should be noted
that all of the images and details visible in Google
Earth are available through other public, free sources;
Google Earth does, however, make it easier to access.
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Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
while they were students at Stanford University and
the company was first incorporated as a privately
held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial
public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising
$1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion. Through
a series of new product developments, acquisitions
and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial
search and advertising business into other areas,
including web-based email, online mapping, office
productivity, and video sharing, among others.
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History
Google began as a research project in January 1996
by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students
at Stanford University, California.[4] They hypothesized
that a search engine that analyzed the relationships
between websites would produce better results than
existing techniques, which ranked results according
to the number of times the search term appeared on
a page.[5] Their search engine was originally nicknamed,
"BackRub" because the system checked backlinks
to estimate a site's importance.[6] A small search
engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar
strategy.[7]
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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 $1.1 million, including
a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the
founders of Sun Microsystems.[8]
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In March 1999, the company moved into offices at
165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several
other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.[9]
After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company
leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI)
in 1999.[10] The company has remained at this location
ever since, and the complex has since become known
as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex,
a 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google
bought the property from SGI for $319 million.[11]
Google
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The Google search engine attracted a loyal following
among the growing number of Internet users, who liked
its simple design.[12] In 2000, Google began selling
advertisements associated with search keywords.[4]
The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered
page design and to maximize page loading speed.[4]
Keywords were sold based on a combination of price
bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05
per click.[4] 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).[13][14][15] While many
of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace,
Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.[4]
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The name "Google" originated from a misspelling
of "googol,"[16][17] which refers to 10100
(the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred
zeros). Having found its way increasingly into everyday
language, 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."[18][19]
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A patent describing part of Google's ranking mechanism
(PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001.[20] The
patent was officially assigned to Stanford University
and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.
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