Google’s growth from Garage to Go to search engine of billions!

The origins of Google can be traced back to Stanford University in 1995. Sergey Brin, a student at Stanford, was assigned to tour Larry Page around while he was considering grad school there.

Initial stages, friendship and the IDEA.

According to some stories, they clashed on practically everything during that initial meeting, but they formed a partnership the following year. They created a search engine using links to determine the relevance of specific pages on the World Wide Web while working from their dorm rooms. Backrub was the name given to this search engine.

BackRub was created at a period when the Web had an estimated 10 million documents and an unfathomable number of nodes between them. The processing resources necessary to crawl such a critter were well above what a typical student project could provide. Page began constructing his crawler without knowing what he was getting himself into. Brin was attracted to the job because of the idea’s complexity and size. He found the theory behind BackRub fascinating as a polymath who has hopped from project to project without deciding on a thesis topic. “I talked to a lot of research groups” at the institution, and “this was the most intriguing topic, both because it handled the Web, which represented human knowledge, and because I liked Larry,” Brin recalls.

The curiosity of two college kids:

Brin and Page devised the PageRank algorithm to translate the backlink data received by BackRub’s web crawler into a measure of relevance for a given web page, and realised that it might be used to build a search engine substantially superior to existing ones. The algorithm was based on a novel technique that examined the importance of backlinks connecting two web pages.Combining their ideas, the two began using Page’s dorm room as a machine lab, extracting spare components from low-cost computers to build a device that connected the then-nascent search engine to Stanford’s broadband campus network.

They converted Brin’s dorm room into an office and programming centre, where they tested their new search engine concepts on the Web, after filling Page’s room with equipment. Stanford’s computing infrastructure had challenges as a result of their project’s rapid expansion. Because they didn’t have a web page developer to design anything aesthetically complex, Page and Brin used the former’s rudimentary HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for visitors. They also started putting together the requisite computing capacity to handle numerous user searches using whatever computer parts they could obtain. As their search engine became more popular among Stanford students, more servers were needed to process the searches.

Backrub→Google

In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc., with the domain name “Googol,” which is derived from the number one followed by one hundred zeros and represents the massive amount of data that the search engine was designed to investigate.Backrub was renamed Google not long after . Larry and Sergey’s objective was to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and valuable,”.The first version of Google, which is still available on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users in August 1996.

Google attracted the attention of not only academics but also Silicon Valley capitalists during the next few years. Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, gave Larry and Sergey a $100,000 check in August 1998, and Google Inc. was established. The newly established crew upgraded from the dorms to their first office, a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki in suburban Menlo Park, California, with this expenditure ,now CEO of YouTube. During those early mornings and late nights, there were clunky desktop PCs, a ping pong table, and a brilliant blue carpet. The tradition of keeping things bright and colourful lives on till today.

All things different and unique:

From Google’s first server (built of Lego) to the first ‘Doodle’ in 1998, a stick figure in the logo alerting to site users that the entire company was playing hooky at the Burning Man Festival, things were unusual from the start. ‘Don’t be evil’ encapsulated our purposefully unusual tactics. The company grew quickly in the years after that, adding engineers, forming a sales staff, and introducing Yoshka, the first company dog. Google outgrew the garage and relocated to Mountain View, California’s current headquarters (dubbed’The Googleplex’). The decision was made in the spirit of doing things differently. Yoshka, the company’s first dog, felt the same as well.

Few of the Google Products:

Beyond Google’s primary search engine, the company’s rapid development has encompassed products, acquisitions, and partnerships (Google Search). It provides services for work and productivity (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), email (Gmail), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), instant messaging and video chat (Google Duo, Google Chat, and Google Meet), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, and Street View), podcast hosting (Google Podcasts), video sharing (YouTube), blog publishing (Blogger),

note-taking (Google Keep and Jamboard), and photo organising and editing (Google Photos). The Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS are all developed by the business (a lightweight, proprietary operating system based on the free and open-source Chromium OS operating system).From 2010 through 2015, Google teamed with major electronics manufacturers to produce its Google Nexus devices, and in 2016, it unveiled a slew of hardware products, including the Google Pixel series of smartphones, the Google Home smart speaker, and the Google Wifi mesh wireless router. Google has also considered becoming an Internet service provider (Google Fiber and Google Fi).

Never Ending thirst for betterment:

The never-ending hunt for better solutions remains at the heart of everything Google does. From YouTube and Android to Gmail and, of course, Google Search, Google now produces thousands of products that are used by billions of people across the world. Despite the fact that they have dumped the Lego servers and added a few more dogs . our passion for building technology for everyone has remained the same — from the college dorm to the garages to now.