Monday, 2 May 2016
Why Google is called Google
The name Google was the result of a small spelling mistake by a close associate of Larry Page.
It is unbelievable, but true! In 1996, it so happened that Larry Page and Sean Anderson, a graduate student working with him, were seated in their office brainstorming on the name of the search engine. It is said that they were using a whiteboard to think of a good name. They were thinking of naming it as something related to the voluminous data the search engine indexed. Sean suggested the name 'googolplex' to which Larry responded saying, "googol!" Incidentally, the word 'googol' refers to a cardinal number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Sean was quick to search the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was available. Interestingly, Sean misspelled 'googol' as 'google' and found it to be available. Larry Page liked the name and soon got it registered in the registry database. And this very powerful search engine of the day got its name. Part of this is also mentioned in Google's History Page.
It is unbelievable, but true! In 1996, it so happened that Larry Page and Sean Anderson, a graduate student working with him, were seated in their office brainstorming on the name of the search engine. It is said that they were using a whiteboard to think of a good name. They were thinking of naming it as something related to the voluminous data the search engine indexed. Sean suggested the name 'googolplex' to which Larry responded saying, "googol!" Incidentally, the word 'googol' refers to a cardinal number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Sean was quick to search the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was available. Interestingly, Sean misspelled 'googol' as 'google' and found it to be available. Larry Page liked the name and soon got it registered in the registry database. And this very powerful search engine of the day got its name. Part of this is also mentioned in Google's History Page.
When Google was founded
Beginning
Google began in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin Ph.D. students at Stanford University.[2]
In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[3] His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[4]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information for an analysis of that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[3]
In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[5] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995—Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[3] Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.[5][6][7][8]
Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.[3] To convert the backlink data that it gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[3] While analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[3][9]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.:[10]
-
- Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
- Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
- Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
- ...
-
- BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras
and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun
Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have
provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin
has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
- -Larry Page [11]
- BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras
and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun
Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have
provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin
has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
Where is Google
The original complex, with 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2) of office space, is the company's second largest square footage assemblage of Google buildings. (The largest single Google building is the 2,900,000-square-foot (270,000 m2) 111 Eighth Avenue building in New York City, which Google bought in 2010.) Once the 1,100,000-square-foot (100,000 m2) Bay View addition went online in 2015, the Googleplex became the largest collection of Google buildings with 3,100,000 square feet (290,000 m2) of space.[1]
"Googleplex" is a portmanteau of Google and complex and a reference to googolplex, the name given to the large number 10(10100), or 10googol (with complex meaning a complex of buildings).
What is Google
Originally known as BackRub, Google is a search engine that started development in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page
as a research project at Stanford University. Larry and Sergey decide
the name of their search engine needs to change and decide upon Google,
which is inspired from the term googol.
The domain google.com was later registered on September 15, 1997, and the company incorporated on September 4, 1998. The picture below is a capture of the site from The Internet Archive of what Google looked like in 1998.
What helps Google stand out from its competition and helps it continue to grow and be the number one search engine is its PageRank technique that sorts search results. While being one of the best search engines on the Internet, Google also incorporates many of its other services, such as Google Maps and Google Local, to provide more relevant search results.
What helps Google stand out from its competition and helps it continue to grow and be the number one search engine is its PageRank technique that sorts search results. While being one of the best search engines on the Internet, Google also incorporates many of its other services, such as Google Maps and Google Local, to provide more relevant search results.
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