About Google

Google

Type : Public

Traded as NASDAQ : GOOG, NYSE: GOOG, FWB: GGQ1

Industry : Internet,Computer software

Founded : Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998)

Founder(s) : Sergey Brin, Larry Page

Headquarters : 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California, United States

Area served : Worldwide

Key people : Larry Page (Co-Founder and CEO), Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman), Sergey Brin (Co-Founder)

Products : See list of Google products.

Revenue : US$ 29.321 billion (2010)

Operating income : US$ 10.381 billion (2010)

Profit : US$ 8.505 billion (2010)

Total assets : US$ 57.851 billion (2010)

Total equity : US$ 46.241 billion (2010)

Employees : 26,316 (March 31, 2011)

Subsidiaries : YouTube, DoubleClick, On2 Technologies, Google Voice, Picnik, Aardvark, AdMob

Website : google.com

History

Main article: History of Google

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee