Google has made the founders astounding rich
Bangalore: Founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google is one of the most powerful technology companies in the world. Google has made the founders astounding rich and today they stand atop an empire, audacious, ambitious and often controversial, according to CNBC.
"When we were trying to name Google, we went through thousands of them. We settled on Google because it sounds fun and it also means a large number - that is, one followed by a hundred zeroes," explains Page. In 1998, the thought of downloading the World Wide Web was audacious in itself. But what started out as a research project has now become a high tech juggernaut. In the late 90s when other search engines like Lycos, AOL, Yahoo and AltaVista crammed their websites with links and ads, Google's plain blank look was actually a problem for the students who first tested it.
Their working style is a culture by itself too. Google's success comes from attracting the best possible employees and then making work irresistible and that means making it fun and lots of fun. There are gyms if you are restless, massages if you are stressed and then there is the food. "We have a team of seven executive chefs here in Mountain View and we have about 18 cafe's in all that we all oversee," says one of the Google chefs. There is Indian cuisine as well as Sushi, Google has it all and best of all - everything is free for employees.
As Google's CEO Eric Schmidt puts it, "We work hard to maintain that what you see as the culture where people feel that they can build things and accomplish what they want and ultimately people stay in companies because they can achieve something."
For Google, product and user was at the core. A basic search engine crawls the internet bouncing from link to link indexing as many web pages as it can. When you do a search it tracks your results based on the number of times the search term appears on each side. Google's masterstroke was to track every website's importance by counting the number of other websites linking back to it. Google figured the more links to a site the more important it must be and the higher it should show up in your search result. They called this approach, page rank after Larry Page and it worked brilliantly.
Google is no longer a start up. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no longer graduate students living on fast foods and credit cards. Today they are worth $15 billion each. According to Forbes magazine, Brin, who immigrated from Russia at age six told us he never thought Google could be successful. And now, they are venturing into the mobile territory. Mobile phone use is skyrocketing, more than four billion worldwide with a billion sold in 2008 alone. Brin wants to make sure Android, Google's operating system for mobile phones, get a big piece of that market.
A little over a decade ago, most people haven?t ever even heard of Google. It is a stunning indication of how one company, once an unknown startup has moved to so many aspects of our lives. Research for the phrase, 'Google's future', and you will get more than a million results but none of them can answer the company?s most pressing question. Could it become too big for its own good and how much more can it improve its search engine? Can it continue to protect our privacy and its future? One thing is for sure, this is Google and everyone will be watching.
Previous post's: CAT students are still unclear
