Ten years ago, a couple of research students at Stanford University thought of a very innovative idea. They dreamt of creating a search engine that could analyze relationships between various websites so that better search rankings could be produced for the results that it would generate. The two mavericks wanted to outdo all the other existing procedures and wanted search results to be ranked according to the number of times a search word emerged on a sheet.

The idea appeared to be very fuzzy, but the determination saw them through. Never in their dreams did they think that their invention one day would become an integral part of everybody’s life all over the world. The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their idea: Google Inc. Yes, the same Google which all of us use to search for almost everything that we think of. This is the story of how Page and Brin created Google Inc., an idea which would go on to define a complete era of technology.

Lawrence E. Page (Larry Page) started a project in 1996 while he was at Stanford and was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow student. The search engine that they thought of creating was initially given the name “BackRub”. The name originated because of the fact that the backlinks were being checked by the system so that the importance of a website could be estimated. They were thoroughly convinced that the pages that their search engine was getting with the maximum number of links from other extremely significant web pages must be the most appropriate pages connected with the search. They started testing their thesis with their studies and thus set the foundation for Google.

The search engine started its operations with the domain name google.stanford.edu from the university’s main website. 15 September 1997 was the day when the domain google.com was registered and 7 September 1998 being the one when the company was officially incorporated as Google Inc. The founders got a check of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim as an initial investment, a gesture which the two will never forget as they did not even have a bank account at that time.

March 1999 was the time when the company moved into an office at Palo Alto, a legendary place which houses other illustrious technology firms. In 2003, the firm leased a compound of buildings in Mountain View and the company has been based there ever since and is fondly known as the ‘Googleplex’. Three years later, property was purchased by Google for $319 million.

Page and Brin took Google public when the IPO happened on 19 August 2004. Around 20 million shares were put on offer at $85 per share. Out of the 20 million, 15 million were floated by the company and the rest of the 5 million were proposed by the existing stockholders. This move gave Google a market capitalization of around $23 billion. But the lump of the shares that were around 271 million remained with the company.

Lots of employees from Google became paper millionaires overnight. A rival search engine, Yahoo, also benefited as they owned around 8.4 million shares ten days prior to the IPO. This made Page and Brin billionaires with their names being mentioned in prestigious magazines like Forbes. Of late the company has also started investing in other media like radio so that the advertisements can be executed on radio also. The company also advertises in magazines and offline newspapers.

Over the years, Google has attracted users from all over the world because of its effortless design and functionality. The chunk of the money that Google has made is courtesy the advertisements that the search engine has sold which are associated with search keywords. The advertisements are based on text so that an organized page design can be maintained and the page loading speed can be maximized. In 2006, the company made over $10 billion as advertising revenue and a paltry $112 million from licensing. Google AdWords gives web advertisers an opportunity to display their ads in the company’s search results via the cost-per-click scheme.

The concept of the sale of keyword advertising was initiated in the market by Goto.com which was later renamed as Overture Services with the company later being purchased by Yahoo and again being renamed as Yahoo Search Marketing. Google started to auction the keywords with the bidding price starting at $.05 per click. Inspite of heavy competition when most of the websites were failing to capitalize on this new marketing strategy, Google enjoyed phenomenal growth in stature as revenues were being generated. This played a huge role in Google becoming the company that it is today.

A very notable fact about Google Inc. is that the name ‘Google’ emerged when the word “googol” was misspelled, with the latter referring to an exponential notation, 10100. The name of the brand had such a global impact that it found itself being mentioned in the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary.

Over the last few years, the company has also made numerous purchases. Acquisitions include Keyhole Inc., which had developed software called Earth Viewer which was later renamed by Google as Google Earth. Google has also purchased YouTube, an online video website for $1.65 billion in stock. Another firm called DoubleClick has been acquired by the search engine giant with the deal being settled at $3.1 billion. Another acquisition in the long list of attainments by Google is Postini, an enterprise messaging security and compliance company.

Google has also ventured into a partnership with GeoEye so that a satellite can be launched which would provide Google with images with high resolution for Google Earth. Another partnership includes a $900 million agreement with News Corp. which includes search material and advertising matter being provided to MySpace, an admired social networking website.

The company has made a lot of transformations and has immensely benefited from them. When the IPO took place, a lot of people went on board saying that the company will experience a lot of changes courtesy the pressure exerted by shareholders and since lots of employees became overnight millionaires on paper. But the founders, Page and Brin maintain that there will be no changes as the compound seems more like a university campus rather than an office park located in a suburb.

Of late, the company has also created a philanthropic section called Google.org which would be aiming towards creating awareness regarding climatic change, poverty and public health. The first project that the search engine will be working on is towards the development of an electric vehicle which can achieve 100 mpg. All these achievements have helped Google retain the legendary status that it has acquired, a standing that will be always there in the annals of the history of software.