About GOOGLE

Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

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. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997,and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.

In March 1999, the company moved into offices in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003. The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design and useful results. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at 5 cents per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).Goto.com was an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross, and was the first company to successfully provide a pay-for-placement search service. Overture Services later sued Google over alleged infringements of Overture's pay-per-click and bidding patents by Google's AdWords service. The case was settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.Thus, while many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.

A patent describing part of the Google ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on 4 September 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google" was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet

ACQUISITIONS

Since 2001, Google has acquired several companies, mainly focusing on small start-ups.

In 2004, Google acquired a company called Keyhole, Inc. which developed a product called Earth Viewer, renamed in 2005 to Google Earth.

In February 2006, software company Adaptive Path sold Measure Map, a weblog statistics application, to Google. Registration to the service has since been temporarily disabled. The last update regarding the future of Measure Map was made on 6 April 2006 and outlined many of the known issues of the service.

In late 2006, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Shortly after, on 31 October 2006, Google announced that it had also acquired JotSpot, a developer of wiki technology for collaborative Web sites

On 13 April 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick. Google agreed to buy the company for $3.1 billion.

On 2 July 2007, Google purchased GrandCentral. Google agreed to buy the company for $50 million.

On 9 July 2007, Google announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise messaging security and compliance company Postini.

On August 5 2009, Google announced the purchase of video software maker On2 Technologies for $106.5 million - its first acquisition of a public company