Google Introduction - What was Google doing before it became this big?

Google began as a research project in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were both PhD students at Stanford University. They thought that a search engine that could analyze the relationships between websites would product better results than other search engines. They called their new creation "BackRub", because it checked the backlinks to estimate a site's importance (by the way, this method is still used today in the infamous Google PageRank algorithm, which rates sites on a 1 to 10 basis based on backlinks, and several other variables, such as site layout, and keywords. Page and Brin would test their thesis as part of their studies at Stanford, and would later house their newly created engine at google.stanford.edu. The logo they had then was much different from today's logo, and the name was changed n September 7, 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the domain Google.com, and officially changed the name to Google - A play on the world Googol, (The number one followed by one-hundred zeros). Perhaps this was because Google has endless sites indexed (almost 800 trillion), or has endless possibilites to expand as it has into the internet dominating search engine and company.

Today, Google is a publicly traded company that handles one of the most used search engines in the world, with a stock price that was originally the highest in its class. The company currently employs 8,000 employees, and is based in Mountain View, California. It also has several other headquarters in places like Seattle, Washington. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Novell, is the new Google's CEO. Google was recently named a verb by two major dictionaries (Merriam Webster and Oxford), its meaning defined as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet". Almost 60% of the market in search engine usage is controlled by Google, and most analysts, and I myself, expect this to increase. But don't expect this increase to come easy, as Microsoft and Ask.com compete with Windows Live Search and Ask Search.

Google offers many innovative services, such as Blogger, Orkut, and Gmail, and since its introduction in 1996, it offers a wide variety of services, not just search anymore. I use Gmail, Orkut, AND Blogger, and I run a tech blog and a video blog using blogger.