Born 10 years ago, the Google internet search engine has grown into the electronic centre of human knowledge by indexing billions of web pages as well as images, books and videos.
On September 15 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two 24-year-old Stanford University students, registered the domain name of ”google.com”. The word is a variation of ”googol”, which refers to the number 10 to the power of 100, a term popularised by United States mathematician Edward Kasner.
Page and Brin incorporated Google one year later, on September 7 1998, in a household garage in northern California.
News of Google spread largely thanks to the efficient way the search engine classified results through algorithms, and it quickly became one of the most used methods to find information on the Internet.
From the beginning Page and Brin considered their role as global internet researchers was crucial.
”We thought research was really important,” said Sergey in a recent interview. ”The other search engines stopped research on search. They thought that ‘if our search engine is only 85% as good as the next guy, it’s good enough for us’.”
To search for internet documents it is necessary to contact each site permanently and memorise its pages, a colossal task for the Google data bank, which is constantly renewed, allowing the users to search for keywords. Google needs several weeks to troll the internet and renew its data bank.
Soon after its launch, this search engine became a motor that ”absorbed” web pages across the internet, at a rate of billions per day.
Google has become the most popular internet search engine in the world outside China, Japan and Russia, handling more than 500-million visits a day.
In 2000, Google began to sell ads linked to keywords. At the time, as the dot-com bubble was bursting and scores of web-based operations were declaring bankruptcy, Google was making a healthy profit.
When Google went public in August 2004, its shared initially sold at $85. Today its shares are valued at $525, and Google has a stock-market value of about $164-billion. In 2006, Google reached $13,4-billion in revenue — the third part based on internet ads — and profits of $3,7-billion.
In the past years, Google has expanded at a breakneck pace, and currently has about 13 700 employees. The company thrives on a culture of innovation: the best example is that it asks employees to dedicate 20% of their time to develop ideas for the company.
Page and Brin, now in their mid-30s, each have about $16-billion dollars in personal wealth.
In 2006, Google bought YouTube, the largest and most popular video-exchange website, and soon after acquired DoubleClick, one of the internet’s most powerful ad services.
Google also launched free email — Gmail — as well as a word-processing program, picture-editing programs and a calendar that competes directly with products from software giant Microsoft.
Despite the company motto of ”Don’t be evil”, it seems that Google’s ubiquitous presence increasingly generates hostility. Both Google and YouTube have been sued by media groups that charge that they have stolen content.
Its ads are directed at a very specific public based on their internet searches. Google’s photographing of city streets has been criticised too, but also admired and widely used.
The human rights group Privacy International is lukewarm on Google’s respect for private data. ”At it most blatant it is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent,” the group said. — Sapa-AFP