"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.", said American novel writer and Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck. In Hi-story, Reasq takes you every Wednesday back in time to an event that changed Europe or the world. Today: the founding of Google.
The Beginning
Santa Margherita Avenue in Menlo Park, California. In the upcoming Silicon Valley, 2 students of the nearby Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rent a garage box from their friend Susan. They set up some desks, some computers and started working on a new Search Engine for the upcoming internet. On September 4, 1998 (exactly 21 years ago), Google was officially born.
It was a side project, as both Page and Brin were still full time students. It had to replace the existing search engines and create an easily navigable place where the world's information could be found in a few seconds. A big motivation for them was that they were against the pop-up advertisements that existing search engines (such as Yahoo! and Excite.com) were using. "An advertising funded model with an overloaded home page is harmful for a search engine", they stated in a paper research they did on the topic. However, they changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads to have an income.
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com. The news website praised Google for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites which at that time were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.
Google's success
It was the start of the success story that Google would become in the following years. Unlike its competitors, Google used a special mathematical method of backlinks which decided whether a website should pop up in the results or not. No one understood the method, but everyone saw the results.
Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it (to his great regret in hindsight...)
A few months later, Page and Brin decided to grow the internet business themselves and moved into offices in the University Avenue in Palo Alto, less than 2 kilometres South of the garage box. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View in 2003. By then, over 1000 people were working at Google and some 150 jobs were looking to be filled in. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googleplex. As of 2019, Google has over 107 thousand employees in more than 70 offices spread over 50 countries.
From Silicon Valley (CA) to Silicon Docks (IR)
In that same year of 2003, Google opens its first office overseas in Dublin, Ireland. Starting with only 5 employees, it now functions as the EU headquarters with over 1500 employees. It has several offices on the so called Silicon Docks, next to the Grand Canal in the Western part of the city. Some of their neighbours include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft, Paypal and eBay. In a time when many weren't sure what digital companies were worth investing in, Ireland took the risk and saw a huge potential in the growing Google. It's low Corporate Tax rate only helped the American company to set up their EU HQ in Dublin.
Google vs Microsoft
Twenty-one years after Google was founded in a Garage box in Menlo Park, it has become much more than a search engine. It first acquired the owner of the Blogger website in 2003, which secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings. It also helped to publish their own 'Google News' application three years later.
In June, 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by stock market value. With Google's increased size came more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft had been touting its Bing search engine to counter Google's competitive position.
Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Bing Maps competes with Google Maps). In addition to an Internet Explorer replacement (Google Chrome), the company also designed its own Linux-based operating system called Chrome OS to directly compete with Microsoft Windows.
Google Now: Alphabet Inc.
On October 2nd, 2015 Google became so big that a corporate restructuring was needed. Google became part of the new mother company Alphabet Inc, of which Larry Page is the CEO and Sergey Brin the president. Besides Google, it includes investment and research companies like Waymo and CapitalG. Way focuses on Self Driving technology.
Meanwhile, Google now offers several online and offline applications. Such as services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail/Inbox), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo, Duo, Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google Keep),and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos).
The company also leads the development of the Android mobile operating system. From 2010, it partnered with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its Nexus devices, and it released multiple hardware products in October 2016, including the Google Pixel smartphone, Google Home smart speaker, Google Wifi mesh wireless router, and Google Daydream virtual reality headset. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier (Google Fiber, Google Fi, and Google Station).
Google is too big
As Google is offering all these frequently used services for free (in exchange for your data), questions have been raised whether or not the monopolistic position of the company should be stopped. Together with the 4 other big tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon) it forms the Big Five: the 5 biggest companies in the world. As they are only getting bigger, they take over any concurrent service created by a third party. This way, these companies influence our lives more than ever...
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