How did GOOGLE do it?

Today no one is unaware what Google is and what it was used for. Have you ever thought who started it and how it all begins? The start of Google was not easy. Before 1995 search engines relied on database of textual keywords. Whenever a user tried to search or locate anything on the web. Whenever a user entered a search term, search engines such as AltaVista and Lycos would compare the search term to their databases of terms. The pages that had text most similar to the search term were considered to be more relevant and were featured higher in the list of search results.

With this kind of process it has a major downside. For example, when searching for “Microsoft” pages for retailers selling Microsoft products might be featured before the Microsoft corporate home page, simply because a single page might list dozens of Microsoft products.

By the year 1997, two students from Stanford had discovered a way better approach in terms of web search and this will become the foundation of the Google we all know today. Google was founded and started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the 4th of September 1998.

Larry Page

Despite its rapid ascent to the search engine supremacy, the concept behind Google was not envisioned as a search engine or even going commercially. It all started with a research of one Stanford students named Larry Page.

Page, the son of a computer scientist from Lansing, Michigan, studied with Stanford at the age of 22 in 1995 after graduating from the University of Michigan. At a time when Stanford graduates were launching lucrative startups all over Silicon Valley, Page was not interested in finding potential commercial applications for his work. The Web could easily lend itself to being diagrammed through nodes and branches. Such a graphical representation shows the interconnectedness of websites and how users move from site to site

Along with many other Stanford researches, decided to take advantage of the Digital Library Initiative of the National Science Foundation, whose mission is to create a vast library of data including personal information, the information found in conventional libraries, and information published by scientific researchers.

Page decided to create an algorithm to evaluate the relevance of certain pages by analyzing the patterns formed by hyperlinks. As described earlier, search engines of the time determined relevancy by looking at the text of a website, or, in Yahoo‘s case, by employing human editors to categorize and describe each page. Instead of using text or human-beings, Page would calculate the relevancy of a page based on links embedded in its HTML and by outside links to the page.

Page’s method of evaluating the relevancy of websites is very similar to how academic writing is evaluated. Authors pay attention to the abstract but determine the importance of a paper by finding the number of academic papers that it cites and the number of times it is cited in other papers. Page applied this method of evaluating academic writing to his evaluating the relevancy of pages on the web. This system is intuitive but complicated. Relationships between pages become very elaborate. For example, links from the Yahoo homepage are going to be more authoritative than links from a child’s GeoCities page. Page devised a system of assigning numerical values to each page based on the number of links it has and the number of times the page is linked to. This system was called PageRank, named after Page himself.

Sergey Brin

In 1996, Page teamed up with fellow Stanford graduate student Sergey Brin. Page had met Brin during a campus tour, and all accounts, the two had not hit it off. As the group walked around the Stanford campus and nearby San Francisco, the two computer scientists argued incessantly, even discussing the finer points of urban planning amidst the hills of San Francisco.

Both of Google’s cofounders recall the other as being obnoxious, but they stayed in touch. Page recruited Brin to help write the software that would keep track of each page’s relevancy, a complex task that could easily overwhelm the network at Stanford if resources were not used efficiently.

Google Proof of Concept

In the year 1996 a search engine based from PageRank concept was made available to Stanford students with both a text index of 24 million pages and databases of the links between these pages. By the year’s end, the search engine, named BackRub, was receiving 10,000 searches a day.

The initial index of PageRank began from Page’s personal website on Stanford’s server. Following the handful of links on the bare-bones site, the index swelled to over 28 GB by the time Page and Brin left Stanford, a considerable size for 1996, when storage was still quite expensive

As the search engine became more popular within Stanford and with the general public, it was renamed Google, a corruption of the name googol given to the number with ‘1’ followed by 100 zeroes. Soon, Google was using so much bandwidth crawling the Internet that it would occasionally overwhelm Stanford’s connection. Students and faculty, many of whom were enthusiastic Google users, did not seem to mind, but it was time for the search engine to find a new home.

BackRub to Google

Having the difficulties with BackRub, the founders tried to have an independent site by presenting a 15 minute presentation to Sun cofounder and venture capitalist Andy Bechtolsheim, and then Google received a $100,000 investment. With this investment Google find a new home off campus in a garage in Silicon Valley, but the investment created some practical difficulties for Page and Brin. Google did not yet exist as a legal identity; it was a project being run out of student offices at Stanford’s computer science department. As a result, the check was not deposited until September 4, the earliest date that Google could be incorporated.

Now Google are separated from Stanford, continued to expand. Page and Brin were both driven to reach profitability as soon as possible and started expanding Google’s operations with an eye towards controlling costs.

When Google was still hosted in Stanford, Page and Brin would beg for components from other department. A CPU was salvaged from the loading dock, and faulty hard drives were rescued from all over the campus. Brin wrote a piece of software that made these broken drive usable, important for storing the very large databases holding PageRank rating and text indexes.

This type of scrounging was impossible in the private sector, but Google was still frugal. Instead of buying dedicated servers running expensive software, Google’s datacenter ran on Linux and used homemade rack-mountable servers. Pictures of the server racks from the time looked like rats nests with tangles of cable and components scattered everywhere.

Focus on Search

Despite Google’s increasing reach, Page and Brin refused to change the core focus on search. Brin, in a later interview, said that “with 100 services, they assumed they would be 100 times as successful. But they learned that not all services are created equal. Finding information is much more important to most people than horoscopes, stock quotes, or a whole range of other things.” As a result, Google retained its now-famous user interface consisting of little more than a search box and an early version of the iconic logo.

Traffic to Google’s website increased quickly with the publicity. By February of 1999, Google was handling 500,000 searches a day. The growing traffic attracted both venture capitalists and technology partners. Armed with the reputation of Google’s original investor, Bechtolsheim, Google was a darling of the top tier venture capitalist firms of Silicon Valley. Both Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital were brought in as new investors for a total of $25 million of new capital, recognition of Google’s rapidly increasing valuation.

Continuous Improvements

On June 26, 2000, Google made two major announcements. First, it had become the largest search engine in the world in terms of pages indexed, beating much older competitors like Lycos and HotBot. The longer that Google’s spiders crawled the Internet, building its index and recalculating PageRank, the better its results. Instead of becoming bloated and unfocused, like many of the other portals, Google was actually becoming better with age.

The result in Google becomes so accurate and popular that it was impossible to ignore. The longer that Google’s spiders crawled the Internet, building its index and recalculating PageRank, the better its results. Instead of becoming bloated and unfocused, like many of the other portals, Google was actually becoming better with age.