Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company's overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.
1995: Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet at Stanford University.
1997: BackRub, the precursor to the Google search engine, is founded.
1998: Google is incorporated and moves into its first office in a Menlo Park, California, garage.
1999: Google moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, and later to Mountain View, California; Red Hat becomes Google's first commercial customer.
2000: Yahoo! Internet Life magazine names Google the Best Search Engine on the Internet; Google becomes the largest search engine on the Web and launches the Google Toolbar.
2001: Google acquires Deja.com's Usenet archive and launches Google PhoneBook; Dr. Eric Schmidt joins Google as chairman of the board of directors and is later appointed CEO.
2002: Google launches the Google Search Appliance, AdWords Select, the 2001 Search Engine Awards, and Google Compute.
GOOGLE is short for:
Meaning Category
10^100; Ten to the power of one hundred (Ten followed by hundred zeros) Academic & Science->Mathematics
Gallery Of Overstimulated GirLs Everytime Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gargantuan On-Line Operation of Government Law Enforcement Miscellaneous->Funnies
General Oblivion and Omnipotent Guide to Lots of Everything Miscellaneous->Funnies
General Organism Optimized For Gratification And Logical Exploration Miscellaneous->Funnies
Girl's Only Online Liberal Engagement Internet->Chat
Giving Opinions & Options Generously Linked Everywhere Internet
God's Only Online Gateway Linking Electronically Community->Religion
Good Offers Other Games Like Examples? Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gracios Opinions Of God's Living Entities Miscellaneous->Funnies
Gradually Overcoming Obstacles by God's Love & Eternity Community->Religion
Gradually Overcoming Our Ghastly Legal Environment Miscellaneous->Funnies
Great Oogling Options Gathered Legally Everyday Miscellaneous->Funnies
Great Opportunity to Operationalize a Gullible Luddite Exploitation Miscellaneous->Funnies
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.[6] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.[7] Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[8][9] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.[10]
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 15 September 1997,[11] and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a US$100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.[12]
Corporate affairs and culture
Left to right, Eric E. Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Google is known for its informal corporate culture, of which its playful variations on its own corporate logo are an indicator. In 2007 and 2008, Fortune Magazine placed Google at the top of its list of the hundred best places to work.[4] Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."[80]
Google has been criticized for having salaries below industry standards.[81] For example, some system administrators earn no more than US$35,000 per year – considered to be quite low for the Bay Area job market.[82] However, Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth.[83]
After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, requested that their base salary be cut to US$1.00.[84] Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because, "their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."[84] Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making US$250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of US$150,000.[84]
They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of US$18.5 billion each.[85]
In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. Justin Rosenstein, Google’s product manager, left in June 2007.[86] Shortly thereafter, Gideon Yu, former chief financial officer of YouTube, a Google unit, joined Facebook[87] along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer, who left in October 2007.[88] In March 2008, two senior Google leaders announced their desire to pursue other opportunities. Sheryl Sandburg, ex-VP of global online sales and operations began her position as COO of Facebook[89] while Ash ElDifrawi, former head of brand advertising, left to become CMO of Netshops Inc.[90]
Google's persistent cookie and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy. As of 11 December 2007, Google, like the Microsoft search engine, stores "personal information for 18 months" and by comparison, Yahoo! and AOL (Time Warner) "retain search requests for 13 months."[91]
U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, on July 1, 2008 ordered Google to give YouTube user data / log to Viacom to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google.[92][93] Google and Viacom, however, on July 14, 2008, agreed in compromise to protect YouTube users' personal data in the $1 billion (£ 497 million) copyright lawsuit. Google agreed it will make user information and internet protocol addresses from its YouTube subsidiary anonymous before handing over the data to Viacom. The privacy deal also applied to other litigants including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League.[94][95] The deal however did not extend the anonymity to employees, since Viacom would prove that Google staff are aware of uploading of illegal material to the site. The parties therefore will further meet on the matter lest the data be made available to the court.[96]
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