On September 7, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially founded Google Inc. They had only $100,000 from an investor in order to start their revolutionary internet search engine -- although of course, at the time, no one could have quite imagined the major impact Google would have on the technological world.
Google actually began as a Stanford University research project (known as "BackRub") two years before the company's official debut. Originally, Page and Brin were merely looking for a way to test their PageRank searching algorithm on the data of the world wide web. But to do it, they needed a large amount of diskspace -- and, in 1996, 4 gigabyte hard disks were the largest available. It wasn't enough, so Page and Brin hooked ten of the drives together and assembled their original Google storage 40-gigabyte device. (By comparison: most modern iPods hold between 32 to 64 gigabytes of information.)
By September 2000, Google had become a 5,000-computer operation, indexing over a billion web pages. (By comparison: in 2008, they indexed one trillion pages, and have over one million computer servers in data centers worldwide.) Today, the site handles a billion searches per day, and receives over seven billion page visits daily.
It's not only the most popular search engine on the internet -- it's easily the most popular website in existence. (Well, at least until 2010, when Facebook passed Google in popular-hit statistics.) That doesn't mean the company is completely without criticism -- since revamping their privacy policies in particular, the company has faced concerns and challenges about exactly what sort of information Google gathers from its users, and what the company does with such information.
Still, the criticism is unlikely to have any major effect on Google's popularity. The search engine has become a part of most computer users' daily life. More than likely, it's well on its way to living up to its namesake and receiving a googol hits ... and beyond.
Other Google trivia:
-- Google rents goats (yes, actual goats) from the company California Grazing. The goats help keep the weeds and brush outside of Google's headquarters in proper check.
-- Google owns YouTube. The search engine company made the purchase in 2006 for a hefty 1.65 billion dollars.
-- The company has a fleet of driverless cars. Their line of Toyota Priuses have officially completed 300,000 miles of test driving -- and without a single accident. (Don't worry, there's always been a pair of human drivers inside just in case anything goes wrong.)
-- Several years ago, Google came to Pittsburgh! Google Pittsburgh's offices are on Penn Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh; employees at the engineering office have worked on such products as AdWords, AdSense, and Android, and have even been behind product launches like Google Shopping.
Google is undeniably a great start for answering your questions -- but don't forget about our Library databases! All you need is your library card number to receive access to articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, and other fact-checked sources for all your research needs.
And be sure to check out these books at MPL to learn more about the history and controversy of Google!
-- Post by Ms. B
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