Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D.

students at Stanford[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (S DLP). The SDLP's goal was to develop the enabling technologies for a single, inte grated and universal digital library" and was funded through the National Scienc e Foundation among other federal agencies.[2][3][4][5] In search for a dissertat ion theme, Page considered among other things exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[6] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later rec alled as "the best advice I ever got"[7]) and Page focused on the problem of fin ding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[6] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student s upported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[2] Brin was alrea dy a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of p otential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[6] P age's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point.[6] To convert the backlink d ata that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[6] Analyzing BackRub's output which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance it occurred to t hem that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than exi sting techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[6][8] A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidia ry of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a simil ar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[9] The technology in RankDex woul d be patented[10] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[11][12] 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 B rin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for th eir search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follow s:[13] Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996) Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes ... BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II w ith 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks. -Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.st anford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They for mally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend' s garage in Menlo Park, California. Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine , or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research pap er in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their m inds and early on allowed simple text ads.[14] Google Home Page September 1998

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.[15] The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Go ogle's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excit e.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloa ded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.[15] In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo A lto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.[16] After q uickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.[ 17] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has si nce become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a number that is equal to 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the proper ty from SGI for US$319 million.[18] The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.[19] In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.[1] The ads were text-based to ma intain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.[1] Keyword s were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click.[1] This model of selling keyword advertising was pi oneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Y ahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).[20][21][22] While many of its d ot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in sta ture while generating revenue.[1] Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went s o far as to include in their prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004 IPO, noting t hat "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served as shareh olders and in all other ways by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."[23] Financing and initial public offering The first funding for Google as a company was secured on August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsys tems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.[24] On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced;[ 25] the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufie ld & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[24] While Google still needed more funding for their further expansion, Brin and Pag e were hesitant to take the company public, despite their financial issues. They were not ready to give up control over Google. After borrowing the $25 million venture capital money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, Sequoia forced Brin and Page to hire a CEO or else they would take back that bo rrowed $12.5 million. Finally, Brin and Page gave in and hired Eric Schmidt as G oogle s first CEO in March 2001 and the company went public three years later.[26] In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares ( IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger.[2 7] However, no such deal ever materialized. In January 2004, Google announced th e hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO wa s projected to raise as much as $4 billion. On April 29, 2004, Google made an S-1 form SEC filing for an IPO to raise as muc h as $2,718,281,828. This alludes to Google's corporate culture with a touch of mathematical humor as e 2.718281828. April 29 was also the 120th day of 2004, an

d according to section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, "a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10 million in assets and/or 500 shareh olders, including people with stock options."[28] Google has stated in its annua l filing for 2004 that every one of its 3,021 employees "except temporary employ ees and contractors, are also equity holders, with significant collective employ ee ownership", so Google would have needed to make its financial information pub lic by filing them with the SEC regardless of whether or not they intended to ma ke a public offering. As Google stated in the filing, their "growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies m ust report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requir ement accelerated our decision." The SEC filing revealed that Google turned a pr ofit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003. In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, ABC and Credit Su isse First Boston as the joint underwriters. They chose the unconventional way o f allocating the initial offering through an auction (specifically, a "Dutch auc tion"), so that "anyone" would be able to participate in the offering. The small est required account balances at most authorized online brokers that are allowed to participate in an IPO, however, are around $100,000. In the run-up to the IP O the company was forced to slash the price and size of the offering, but the pr ocess did not run into any technical difficulties or result in any significant l egal challenges. The initial offering of shares was sold for $85 each. The publi c valued it at $100.34 at the close of the first day of trading, which saw 22,35 1,900 shares change hands. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004.[29] A total of 1 9,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.[30] Of that, 14,142,1 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5 35 (another mathematical reference as v2 ,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Goog le a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[31] Many of Google's employ ees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also bene fited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.[32] The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG. Growth The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hard ware and was designed to be very fault-tolerant In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading web log hosting website. Some analysts considered the acquisition incons istent with Google's business model. However, the acquisition secured the compan y's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the sea rch engine Google News. At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 84.7% of all search request s on the World Wide Web through its website and through its partnerships with ot her Internet clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN. In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some market share, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness, and today the verb "to google" has entered a number of language s (first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a genericized trademark). the relationship between Google, Baidu, and Yahoo After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock p rice more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of shares outstanding w as 172.85 million while the "free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held

by insiders). In January 2005 the number of shares outstanding was up 100 milli on to 273.42 million, 53% of that was held by insiders, which made the float 127 .70 million (up 110 million shares from the first trading day). The two founders are said to hold almost 30% of the outstanding shares. The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock struct ure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share ge tting one. Page says in the prospectus that Google has "a dual class structure t hat is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to b et on the team, especially Sergey and me." The company has not reported any trea sury stock holdings as of the Q3 2004 report. On June 1, 2005, Google shares gained nearly four percent after Credit Suisse Fi rst Boston raised its price target on the stock to $350. On that same day, rumor s circulated in the financial community that Google would soon be included in th e S&P 500.[33] When companies are first listed on the S&P 500 they typically exp erience a bump in share price due to the rapid accumulation of the stock within index funds that track the S&P 500. The rumors, however, were premature and Goog le was not added to the S&P 500 until 2006. Nevertheless, on June 7, 2005, Googl e was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media c ompanies by stock market value. On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it wo uld sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as p 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $ 7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets".[34] On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NA SA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) R&D c enter at NASA's Ames Research Center, and on December 31, 2005 Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership see Partnerships below. Additionally in 2005, Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Googl e will hire employees to help in the open source office program OpenOffice.org.[ 35] With Google's increased size came more competition from large mainstream technol ogy companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google.[36] Microsoft had been touting its Bing search engine to counter Google's competiti ve position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlappin g services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online and local d esktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Earth). In addition to an Internet Explorer replacem ent Google designed its own Linux-based operating system called Chrome OS to dir ectly compete with Microsoft Windows. There were also rumors of a Google web bro wser, fueled much by the fact that Google is the owner of the domain name "gbrow ser.com". These were later proven when Google released Google Chrome. This corpo rate feud is most directly expressed in hiring offers and defections. Many Micro soft employees who worked on Internet Explorer had left to work for Google.[cita tion needed] This feud boiled over into the courts when Kai-Fu Lee, a former vic e-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to s top his move by citing Lee's non-compete contract (he had access to much sensiti ve information regarding Microsoft's plans in China). Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on December 22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential.[37] Click fraud has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Go ogle's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "someth

ing has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potential ly, it threatens our business model."[38] Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers", when it comes to click fraud. While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has also recently began to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publica tions. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio adv ertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio.[39] This will allow Google to combine two advertisin g media the Internet and radio with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from i ts advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements i n the Chicago Sun-Times.[40] They have been filling unsold space in the newspape r that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements. During the third quarter 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don 't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our pro duct strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the sa me thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to s ee new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we buil d." After months of speculation, Google was added to the Standard & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006.[41] Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in Houston that had been acquired by ConocoPhillips.[42] The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%.[43] Over the course of the past decade, Google has become quite well known for its c orporate culture and innovative, clean products, and has had a major impact on o nline culture. Name The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol",[44][45] which refer s to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on PageRank:[46] "We chose our systems name, Googl e, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our go al of building very large-scale search engines." However, there are uses of the name going back at least as far as the creation o f the comic strip character Barney Google in 1919. Enid Blyton used the phrase " Google Bun" in The Magic Faraway Tree (published 1941) The Folk of the Faraway T ree (published 1946),[47] and called a clown character "Google" in Circus Days A gain (published 1942).[48] There is also the Googleplex Star Thinker from Dougla s Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In March 1996 a business called G roove Track Productions applied for a United States trademark for "Google" for v arious products including several categories of clothing, stuffed toys, board ga mes, and candy. The firm abandoned its application in July 1997.[49][verificatio n needed] Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictio nary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."[50][51] The use of the term itself reflects their mission to orga nize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.[45] In November 2009 , the Global Language Monitor named "Google" No. 7 on its Top Words of the Decad e list.[52] In December 2009 the BBC highlighted Google in their "Portrait of th e Decade (Words)" series.[53] In May 2012, David Elliott filed a complaint again

st Google, Inc. claiming that Google s once distinctive mark GOOGLE has become gene ric and lacks trademark significance due to its common use as a transitive verb. After losing to Google in UDRP proceedings involving many Google-related domain n ame registrations that he owns, Elliott now seeks a declaratory judgment that hi s domain names are rightfully his, that they do not infringe any trademark right s Google may own, and that all Google s registered GOOGLE marks should be cancelled since google is now a common generic word worldwide that means to search the Inter net. [54] Philanthropy In 2004, Google formed a non-profit philanthropic wing, Google.org, giving it a starting fund of $1 billion.[55] The express mission of the organization is to h elp with the issues of climate change (see also global warming), global public h ealth, and global poverty. Among its first projects is to develop a viable plugin hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg.[56] Acquisitions Main article: List of Google acquisitions Since 2001, Google has acquired several small companies, often consisting of inn ovative teams and products. One of the earlier companies that Google bought was Pyra Labs. They were the creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform, firs t launched in 1999. This acquisition led to many premium features becoming free. Pyra Labs was originally formed by Evan Williams, yet he left Google in 2004. I n early 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online co llaborative word processor, Writely. The technology in this product was combined with Google Spreadsheets to become Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The logo of YouTube, which in late 2006 was acquired by Google. On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would buy the popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion[57] and maintain YouTube as a separate brand, rat her than merging it with Google Video. Meanwhile, Google Video signed an agreeme nt with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group, for both compan ies to deliver music videos to the site.[58] The deal was finalized by November 13, 2006.[59] On October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased JotSpot, a company t hat helped pioneer the market for collaborative, web-based business software to bolster its position in the online document arena.[60] On March 17, 2007, Google announced its acquisition of two more companies. The f irst is Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, a company that specializes in developi ng information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and ani mated ways[61] On the same day, Google also announced its acquisition of Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising company based in San Francisco, California.[ 62] Partnerships Google has worked with several corporations, in order to improve production and services. On September 28, 2005,Google announced a long-term research partnershi p with NASA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA and Google are planning to w ork together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massi vely distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building would also include labs, office s, and housing for Google engineers.[63] In October 2006, Google formed a partne rship with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologi es. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open sourc e office program OpenOffice.org.[35] Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 2

1, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a US$1 billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL.[64] As part of the collaboration, G oogle plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video servi ce within Google Video. This did not allow users of Google Video to search for A OL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network w ill also increase. In August 2006, Google signed a $900 million offer with News Corp.'s Fox Interac tive Media unit to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp . websites including IGN, AmericanIdol.com, Fox.com, and Rotten Tomatoes, althou gh Fox Sports is not included as a deal already exists between News Corp. and MS N.[65][66] On December 6, 2006, British Sky Broadcasting released details of a Sky and Goog le alliance.[67] This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com". In 2007, Google displaced America Online as a key AD Tracks Santa program.[68][69][70] Google Earth give visitors to the website the impression that s' progress in 3-D.[71] The program also made its 007 as part of its partnership with Google.[72] partner and sponsor of the NOR was used for the first time to they were following Santa Clau presence known on YouTube in 2

In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, allowing the Pope to have his own channel on YouTube.[73] In January 2013, Google announced a partnership with Kia Motors and Hyundai. The partnership integrates Google Maps and Place into new car models to be released later in 2013.[74] New mobile top-level domain In coordination with several of the major corporations, including Microsoft, Nok ia, LG, Samsung, and Ericsson, Google provided financial support in the launch o f the .mobi top level domain created specifically for the mobile internet, stati ng that it is supporting the new domain extension to help set the standards that will define the future of mobile content and improve the experience of Google u sers.[75] In early 2006, Google launched Google.mobi, a mobile search portal off ering several Google mobile products, including stripped-down versions of its ap plications and services for mobile users.[76] On September 17, 2007, Google laun ched "Adsense for Mobile", a service to its publishing partners providing the ab ility to monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads.[77] Also in September, Google acquired the mobile social networking s ite, Zingku.mobi to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google appli cations, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mob ile devices."[78] Legal battles Gonzales v. Google On Wednesday, January 18, 2006, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to co mpel in United States district court in San Jose seeking a court order that woul d compel search engine company Google Inc. to turn over "a multi-stage random sa mple of one million URL s" from Google s database, and a computer file with "the tex t of each search string entered onto Google s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)."[79] Go ogle maintains that their policy has always been to assure its users' privacy an d anonymity, and challenged the subpoena. On March 18, 2006, a federal judge rul ed that while Google must surrender 50,000 random URLs, the Department of Justic e did not meet the necessary burden to force Google to disclose any search terms entered by its users in google.