Search Engines and Growth of Google!

Yahoo! started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle". The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.

They were trying to find funding’s for Yahoo, but they couldn’t get it. Hence, they started accepting ads as a sort it made them quite a revenue.

There was an search engine called Excite, which worked on a similar algorithm but it was slightly faster in producing the results.

Although Yahoo having a great success, but they lost sight of what users brought in to in first place. More emphasis was on the ads and less on making the search content better. Thus came the birth of Google.

In 1996, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin start a project to better organize internet search results. The duo made an algorithm that ranks pages based on the number of other pages that link back to it. They initially called their project “Backrub” but quickly change the name to Google, as a play on a mathematical symbol.

In 1998, The co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, a Stanford alum, takes notice of Brin and Page’s idea and writes the pair a check for $100,000. It marks Google’s first investment. Then armed with capital, Page and Brin move Google out of Stanford and into its first office, the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California.

In 1999, The growing company now has eight employees and is too big for the Menlo Park garage. It moves into a real office in Palo Alto, California. The company touts a major investment in its first ever press release. The venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital invest $25 million.

In 2000, Google begins selling advertising through a program called Google AdWords. It offers marketers the opportunity to purchase relevant keywords that appear next to search results. The revenue from these ad sales will help propel Google to one of the richest companies in the world.

They got this idea from Bill Gross.

Bill Gross had sued Google for copying his technique from the Yellow Pages. Google offered him a good share and he happily accepted it.

In 2004, The search company launches its webmail service, Gmail, by invitation only. The ad supported service becomes massively popular because it offers a large amount of free storage to its users. Google’s email will eventually integrate a bevy of products, including a productivity suite called Google Docs that challenges Microsoft Office for word processing dominance.

In one of the most hotly anticipated tech IPOs ever, Google debuts on the Nasdaq at $85 a share. Though the price is much lower than anticipated, it values the company at a staggering $23 billion. The company’s controversial phrase “Don’t be evil” was included in its IPO filings. Brin, Page and Schmidt cut their annual salaries to $1.

Google is the fastest growing company in Fortune 500. Google is ported gargantuan profits into countless experiments and projects sticking his fingers in every pie within its reach. There's Google library, Google books, Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google spreadsheets, Google Docs and many more.