“Always deliver more than expected”- Larry Page.
And deliver he did! Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions in the history of the IT industry. Google has transformed the way we consume information and has become synonym with all types of information search on the internet. So much so that ‘Google It’ is a popular lingo amongst the youngsters now. Today, Google as a company has grown to offer products far beyond just the search engine domain. In this article, we take a look at the co-founder of Google Larry Page and the story of Google, its inception, growth & success.
Google – Quick Facts
- Co-Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is an American multinational technology firm specializing in internet-related products and services. Google’s services include online advertising, search engine, cloud computing, software, and much more.
- The word Google is a play on ‘googol’, which is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numerical 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- Google currently processes 40,000 search queries per second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
- In 2012, an internal Google report disclosed that Google’s search engine found more than 30 trillion unique URLs on the web, crawls 20 billion sites a day, and processes 100 billion searches every month.
- In 2015, American multinational conglomerate Alphabet Inc. was created as the parent company of Google and several other companies previously owned by or tied to Google. The reorganization of Google into Alphabet was completed on October 2, 2015.
- In November 2015, Google was ranked first amongst themost visited multi-platform web properties in the United States with 247 million U.S. unique visitors and a market share of 63.9 percent among the leading U.S search engine providers.
Larry Page: A Brief Introduction
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Page is an American Computer Scientist and an internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Larry Page is the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. Born on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan, his father was a Ph. D in Computer Science and a professor at Michigan State University and his mother an instructor in computer programming. A voracious reader in his youth, Page spent a lot of time poring over Science & Technology books and magazines. Page always liked to invent things and at the age of 12 knew that someday he was going to start a company. Page holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, with honors and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Page took over as the CEO of Google in 2011 taking over the reins from Eric Schmidt and stepped down and handed over the charge to Sundar Pichai in 2015. Page is now the CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin its President.
Personal Life
In 2007, Larry Page married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. Page and Southworth have two children born in 2009 and 2011.
Page’s life has been hugely influenced by four factors; his grandfather’s history in the early labour movement, his education in Montessori schools, his admiration for his hero- the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, and his participation in the leadership institute at the University of Michigan’s Engineering School. Page admitted in an interview that the hardships of his grandfather’s story made him want to make Google an entirely different kind of workplace, one that, instead of crushing the dreams of workers, encouraged their pursuit.
Page suffers from paralyzed vocal cords that are caused by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. The Page family foundation frequently donates to charities and in 2014 Page donated $15 million to aid the efforts against the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.
The ‘Who Founded Google’ Story
In the year 1995, while in the Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergei Brin initiated the process of developing a search engine as part of their research project & named it as the “BackRub”. This search engine was designed to explore the connecting links between web pages so as to determine a site’s authority.
In the year 1996, Page’s web crawler began to explore the web, with Stanford home page serving as the initial phase. Later in the year 1998, Page and Brin decided to formally incorporate their company & set up their first data center in a garage.
Soon Page & Brin started looking for investors to back their initiative. Eventually, Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested about $100,000 in their company. Over a period of time, the duo managed to raise over $1 million.
Finally, Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998, with its first employee being Craig Silverstein, who later became Google’s Director of Technology. Initially, Google served over 10,000 queries a day & steadily gained a reputation of the most reliable source of information. By 1999, it was serving over 500,000 queries a day and the company soon expanded from a mere four wall garage to now a mega office that is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Achievements
- In 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow and along with Sergey Brin was named by MIT’s Technology Review publication as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
- In 2004, Page and Brin received theMarconi Foundation’s prize and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University.
- In 2004, X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee of their board and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- In 2008 Page received theCommunication Award from King Felipe at the Princess of Asturias Awards on behalf of Google.
- In 2011, Page was ranked 24th on theForbes list of billionaires, and as the 11th richest person in the U.S.
- In 2009, Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan during a graduation commencement ceremony.
- At the completion of 2014,Fortune magazine named Page its “Businessperson of the Year,” declaring him “the world’s most daring ”
- In October 2015, Page was named number one inForbes’ “America’s Most Popular Chief Executives”, as voted by its employees
Over the years, Google has achieved many spectacular milestones. Their audience continued to grow rapidly along with their reputation for being the most efficient, reliable firm offering relevant data search at maximum speeds.
Here are some of Google’s accomplishments listed below.
- Ad Sense
Ad Sense is a self-serving advertising platform that plays a significant role in giving Websites a fully automated way to make money. For Google, it nearly accounts for more than 30 percent of its total revenues. - Google Maps
Google Maps is one of the biggest inventions for Google that forms the backbone for many important services such as Latitude, Places, and Maps Navigation. - G-mail
G-mail is a popular Web-based e-mail program just like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. It serves as a home base for other Google services such as Google Chat, voice calls, and contacts. - Android
Google took over Android Inc. in 2005 and announced the Android smartphone platform within two years. Today it has become a huge success & has become the consumer market’s best-selling smartphone platform. - YouTube In October 2006 Google bought the one-year-old YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. YouTube allows registered users to upload videos onto their channels where anyone can watch them.
- Verizon Partnership
The partnership of Verizon gave the much-needed marketing push to the success of Android phones. Soon, Google’s mobile platform managed to jump ahead of Apple’s I-Phone sales. - I-Phone Search
By partnering with Apple to provide the default search engine on iPhone’s, Google gained a good foothold on the fast-growing mobile operating system. This led to a rapid growth & domination of Google in the mobile search market.
So, now you know the role that Larry Page and Google play in helping us complete our day-to-day assignments and do well in examinations.
Also check out our article on What if there was no Google here.
