Larry Page and Sergey Brin(Founders of Google) found the dominant, efficient, unbeatable web
search giant company on the earth, in 1998, with an intention of putting
together world’s information and making it easily accessible. There evolved a
new definition for web search, which created a history. Their web search
criteria revolutionized and ruled the Web. The base idea by which they created
the search technology for Google mostly pivoted on a key point “Their
technology analyzed the number of times a given website was linked to by other
sites; assuming that the more links, the more relevant the site is and ranked
the sites accordingly”. Today Google stands with pride with a yearly revenue of
$6 billion and both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the world’s richest
technocrats. Recently the verb “to Google” made its place into Oxford English
Dictionary.
Google achieved a path breaking success and was the most loved site of
the customers throughout the world, because of the fact that Google has a
highly user friendly and simple interface. Other things that added upon for the
success of Google were; paid links were clearly demarcated and identified,
pop-windows or banner ads were not used and the homepage offered a clear logo
and a single search box, where as the other search engines of that era were
unbelievably saturated with sponsor messages. The major criteria that account
to the huge success of Google other than technology are its site design and the
mode of advertising.
Brin and Page met in computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford in the
mid 90’s. Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created
by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and
23 years old respectively. Brin and Page first began with BackRub software and
re-launched it under the name Google, chosen as a play on words of ‘googol’ a mathematical
term meaning ‘one’ followed by 100 zeros. They used Stanford University website
to host their program, with their website being google.stanford.edu.
Both friends together started working on the revolutionary search
technology since 1996 and in 1998 they dropped out of Stanford and they started
Google at a garage office, at Melano Park. Later in 2004, they took the company
public.
Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001, while they
hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. In January 2011, Google
announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year. Both
Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4, 2011, Page
officially became the chief executive officer of Google, while Schmidt stepped
down to become executive chairman.
On September 13, 1997, www.google.com was officially registered. One
year later, Brin and Page incorporated Google as a private company, on
September 7, 1998. It is an amazing fact that over 10,000 people viewed Google
everyday at its very beginning stage, just by word of mouth advertising and
continued to grow at the rate of 20% per month. In spite of many people using
Google, Brin and Page did not have enough resources like computers to provide
outstanding services to the customers. As they wanted everyone in the world to
use Google search engine, they were desperately in need of capital, when the
co-founder of Sun Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to an entity
called Google Inc, which had not come into existence yet, in August 1998. In
September, Google was incorporated in California, and Page and Brin opened a
new bank account on the company’s name in which Andy’s cheque was deposited.
They nearly bought 120 hard drives for a good deal, using all credit cards of
their friends, and had a massive credit card debt. They felt some relief when
private investments from Stanford came through.
The company later shifted from the dorm to a friend’s garage at 232
Santa Margarita, Menlo Park. In December 1998, Google was recognized as top 100
web sites of choice, as a search engine providing extremely relevant results,
by Times magazine. Brin and Page soon came to know that they had hit something
big. As some potential partners like Yahoo! showed little or no interest to
license their technology, they decided to grow the company by themselves.
Soon they began approaching angel investors, venture capitalists and
tried hard to raise money and had been successful, because most of them were
convinced to invest for the great and worthy product they had in hand and
everyone were using it. They managed to raise nearly $1million in all.
In 1999, Google finally moved into an office at 165 University Avenue
in Palo Alto, California, with just eight employees. By this time, Google was
answering over 500,000 searches each day. The same year, Google got its first
commercial search customer, Red Hat, and managed to secure $25 million from two
leading venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, in Silicon
Valley. As Google started hiring more number of people, Google’s headquarters
was shifted to its current location 2400 E. Bayshore, Mountain View,
California. Companies such as AOL/Netscape selected Google as its search
engine, pushing Google’s users into millions.
In the year 2000, as many as 15 language versions of google.com were
released (French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean). Google forged a
partnership with Yahoo! and announced first billion-URL index to become world’s
largest search engine.
In the year 2001, Google had a partnership with Universo Online (UOL),
making Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans and its
index size increased to 3billion web documents. In 2002 the first Google’s
hardware was released, Ad words were released on new cost-per-click basis, A
set of API’s were released enabling developers to query more than 2 billion
documents and program them in their favorite environment including Java, Perl
and Visual Studio. A major partnership with AOL was announced to offer Google
search, for more than 34mn customers using CompuServe, Netscape, and AOL.com.
Google’s R&D team released Google labs a place to try beta technologies.
In the year 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger.
Google launched, content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers
large and small to access Google‘s vast network of advertisers. Google Print
was also launched. In 2004, the company moved to “Googleplex” at 1600
Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, with a big campus to accommodate 800
plus employees. Orkut was launched to enter sphere of social networking. Google
search index hit 6bn items, including 880 million images and 4.28 billion web pages.
The company went public offering 19,605,052 shares on Wall Street, at $85 per
share, on August 18, 2004. Google index reached nearly 8bn.
Likewise, over the consequent six years, Google continued to grow and
expand its services. It introduced innovative advertising programs, improved
its own benefits,went international and partnered with other corporate giants.
Today, Google became the only website, available in more than 35 languages and
is used by over 380 million people worldwide. There is no surprise to say that
people of all age groups cannot live without Google.
About Sergey Brin
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Born
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Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin
August 21, 1973 (age 38) Moscow, Soviet Union |
Alma mater
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University of Maryland (B.S. 1993)
Stanford University (M.S. 1995) |
Occupation
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Computer scientist, internet entrepreneur
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Residence
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Los Altos, California, U.S.
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Nationality
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American
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Marital Status
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Married
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Children
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One
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The founder of the great company Google, Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was
born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and
Eugenia. Brin immigrated to U.S.A, when he was just six years old along with
his parents and younger brother, Samuel, due to increasing discrimination in
the U.S.S.R, at that point of time. Sergey Brin’s father, Michael Brin, is a
mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Brin’s mother was also a
mathematician and civil engineer, who worked at NASA as a specialist.
Knowing Brin’s growing interest in Mathematics and Computers, Brin’s
father provided him with his first computer, a Commodore 64, when he was nine
years old. He attended Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland,
followed by Eleanor Roosevelt High School. Brin graduated from the University
of Maryland with an honors degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, in the
year 1993. As Brin received a graduate fellowship from the National Science
Foundation, he got a chance to pursue his Master’s degree in Computer Science
at Stanford University, which was completed in 1995. Brin had intent to pursue
Ph.D., but a project, with fellow Stanford student Larry Page, distracted his
attention.
Brin married Anne Wojcicki in May 2007 in The Bahamas, a biotech
analyst and a graduate of B.S in Biology, at Yale University. She had a
profound interest in health information and co-founded the firm “23andMe"
which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup. Brin and his
wife run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation.
Although Brin dropped from Stanford, he is officially still on leave
from Stanford. Brin is quite active on Google Plus and posts many updates every
few days. Brin is also known as a person who likes adventures, it is not
surprising that he posts a lot of travel related photographs in his Google Plus
updates. 164,126 Google+ users have him in their circles as of now.
Awards & Accolades
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Brin had many honors and accolades in his account, for his best
entrepreneurship with scientific, creative, and innovative use of technology.
Some of them are mentioned below
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According to Forbes, Brin is currently named as the 24th richest
person in the world with a personal wealth of US$19.8 billion in 2011.
In November 2009, Forbes magazine declared Brin as fifth most
powerful person in the world. Earlier that same year, in February, Brin was
inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is among the highest
professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.
In 2004, Brin was named "Person of the Week" by ABC
World News Tonight.
In 2004, Brin received the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate
Award, in Chicago.
In 2004, Brin received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the
"Highest Award in Engineering", and was elected Fellows of the
Marconi Foundation at Columbia University.
In 2003, Brin received an honorary MBA from IE Business School
for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation
of new businesses.
In 2002, Brin was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as
one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. |
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About Larry Page
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Born
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Lawrence Larry Page
March 26, 1973 (age 38) East Lansing, Michigan, U.S. |
Alma mater
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University of Michigan (B.S.) Stanford University (M.S.)
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Occupation
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C.E.O of Google
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Residence
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Palo Alto, California, U.S.
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Nationality
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American
|
Marital Status
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Married
|
Children
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One
|
The co-founder of Google, Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing,
Michigan, on March 26, 1973. Page’s father, was a computer science professor at
Michigan State University and his mother, Gloria, was also a
computer-programming teacher. Page recalls that he fell in deep love with
computers, at a very tender age of seven and Page was always the first student
at his elementary school to turn in a word-processed homework assignment.
Before Page earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University
of Michigan, he attended East Lansing High School. After his bachelor’s degree
he went to Stanford University to earn his Master’s degree.
Page is very fair minded and he admits that the doctoral program was
scary. Page met Brin while he was pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at
Stanford, they soon explored a common interest in data-mining and retrieving
relevant information from large data sets and together, they wrote a paper
entitled, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which
has today become the tenth most accessed scholarly paper at Stanford.
Page married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist and sister of
actress and model Carrie Southworth, in the year 2007, at Richard Branson's
Caribbean island, Necker Island. He has one child. Larry is not that active as
his friend Brin on Google Plus and he has publicly posted only twice in the
last month. 239,349 Google Plus users have him in their circles as of now.
Awards & Accolades
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Larry Page has won many awards and accolades for his highly
knowledgeable engineering brain which has invented a great technology for use
of millions of people around the globe. Here are few of them
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In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of the world’s
billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.
Page received an honorary doctorate from the Michigan University
in 2009 during graduation commencement ceremonies.
In 2005, Page was elected as Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences.
In 2004, Page was named "Person of the Week" by India
News.
In 2004, the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.
In 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2004, Page received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the
"Highest Award in Engineering," and got elected as Fellow of the
Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. In 2003, Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School
for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation
of new businesses.
In 2002, the World Economic Forum named Page a Global Leader for
Tomorrow. In 2002, Page, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as
one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. | |
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