Today, many of us simply cannot imagine a world without technology industry giants such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others. Although, of course, there were times when these companies did not exist, and their founders were ordinary people, like you and me.

Of course, how they achieved success can be an interesting story with a happy ending that can teach each of us something. It is not without reason that many ordinary Internet users are so interested in the biographies of famous companies, and at the same time the people who stand behind them. It is for such people that this article will be published.

In it we will tell the story of the formation of one of the most famous brands in the world - a search engine whose name is written with two “o” (in English). And no, it's not Yahoo. Our story will be dedicated to those who are called “the founders of Google” - two business partners, one of whom has Russian roots.

Where it all started

Surprisingly, the development of the modern Internet giant began back in 1996. Then two graduates of Stanford University - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - worked on a common project. The purpose of the latter was to systematize information in the form of a catalog and its further processing. At the time of the creation of such a product, the founders of Google, of course, did not know what all this could lead to. These were, in fact, simple graduate students who came up with an original approach. He, in turn, justified himself many times over.

At the initial stage, as is known from many sources, the developers of the Backrub project experienced a significant lack of finances. For this reason, they often had to literally cobble together functional solutions from parts of outdated computers that had fallen into disrepair. Despite this, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were able to show good results already in 1997. More and more people at the university began to learn about their system for searching information on the Internet.

Search for a buyer

Few people know, but in 1998, shortly after the start of development of their technology, the founders of Google intended to sell all the results of their work. There were several reasons for this - the guys did not want to continue working on the project; they understood that they could simply make good money on this innovation and start something new, more interesting. In order to find an interested buyer, they even created a special office. The founders of Google were able to establish some connections (in particular, with the founder of Yahoo, the largest search engine at that time). True, David Filo was not interested in the system at the level to invest in it. He advised the guys to further refine their search project (even then it was called Google), and if they succeeded, sell it ready-made.

First office

It is noteworthy that the first office space that housed three company employees was a garage. His guys rented it to Menlo Parennu (California). At this point, the service was already available on the Internet; Every day it was visited by about 10 thousand people who were looking for information of one kind or another.

The success that each Google founder achieved could be considered unlikely even at that time. This is evidenced by the fact that some reputable US publications placed the site in the “Top 100” ranking of technology portals in the world.

The dizzying growth continued. In 1999, the company processed about 500 thousand requests per day on its portal. The founders of Google, whose photos you see below, were able to attract several investments from leading funds totaling $25 million. The money was used to purchase servers and expand the capabilities of the search engine.

Larry Page

If we talk about this figure at Google, then after reading Page’s biography, you will not be surprised by his choice of profession. Larry's parents are a computer science professor and a programming teacher. He was born in 1973, and today, at 42 years old, Page is a dollar billionaire. This founder of Google is deservedly included in the top twenty of the Forbes.com ranking with his fortune.

According to media information, he is married, lives in the USA and owns his own Boeing 767.

Sergey Brin

For us, Brin’s biography is more interesting, if only for the reason that this founder of Google is Russian. According to publicly available data, at the age of 6 he left Moscow, where he lived with his parents, teachers at Moscow State University (Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics). Later, Brin's father began working at Stanford, and his mother went to NASA. While studying for a master's degree at the same university, Sergei became interested in search engines, as a result of which he began the first steps to create Google back then.

At the moment, Brin is married and has a son. Like Page, he ranks in the top 20 of Forbes' wealth estimates.

The basis of success

As we can see, it was no coincidence that Google founders Sergey Brin (photo below) and Larry Page found success in the field of Internet search and development of online services. In fact, such a sharp rise was preceded by long work. Both were from an intelligent family of specialists in mathematics and technology. Both grew up in the USA - a land of technological opportunities at that time. Each founder of Google worked to improve search technology, with the goal of starting a company and making money being only the last in the line of goals. This is evidenced by the fact that a private company based on this technology was created after repeated testing. Moreover, the guys wanted to sell their work and “disperse” in their own interests. There are even rumors that in the early days of working together they couldn’t even tolerate each other because their characters were too different. However, as we see, fate decided differently.

Increasing positions

The growth of Google's presence in the Internet search market has become colossal. At that time, the undisputed leaders were Yahoo, WebAlta, AltaVista. As you know, today none of them can compete with Google in terms of capitalization. In a very short time, a little-known university project was able to bypass the “business sharks”.

Experts believe that the explanation that Google founder Sergey Brin and his partner Larry Page were able to consolidate their efforts so successfully lies in the idea. It was to develop the perfect search technology. At the same time, companies like Yahoo at that time paid attention to profits and income from other types of business. The direction of Internet search as of 98-99 was considered unprofitable and unpromising. Perhaps Page and Brin simply did not know about it.

Creation of new businesses

But today, when the Google search engine is the absolute and undisputed leader in search throughout the world, the development team is conducting completely different types of business. We can say that after a successful start in the field of searching and systematizing information, the founders of the system began to work in other areas.

In particular, this is the YouTube video blogging service (which is the leader in terms of the volume of videos posted on it); the most popular blogging platform Blogger.com, the Google Plus social network, Google Drive, Google Adsense advertising and much more. We will tell you a little more about each of these types of businesses from the search giant in separate parts of the article.

Social media

The most popular projects, as time has shown, are social networks. This is explained by the fact that people by nature are inclined to communicate, establish connections with each other, make acquaintances, and so on. One of the most famous in the world is the service launched by the search engine - it is called Google Plus. This is an identification platform that not only allows the user to find his friends and communicate with them, but also gives the opportunity to express his opinion about a particular resource on the Internet, leaving an appropriate “tag” - the so-called “plus”. This, in turn, helps to improve the mechanisms developed by Google to evaluate sites. Those that receive more “pluses” deserve a higher position in search results. As of 2013, the social network had more than 500 million registered users.

For the company, thanks to the merging of different services together, a single image is created, positions in different niches are strengthened solely due to the name. For the user, which is important, this increases convenience and comfort in work. A person, as already mentioned, does not need to switch from one account to another - for all this there is a unified authorization system. With it, there is no need to use third-party services - all tasks can be completed quickly and easily on one site, and this is Google.

Mobile platforms

Speaking about the achievements of the search giant, one cannot fail to mention the world's most popular mobile operating system. To be more precise, the history of Android began as just another startup that served as a platform for mobile devices. In 2005, it was acquired by Google. For many IT industry specialists, this was a real surprise - few could say why the search engine needed the development of a mobile OS. Today, years after that deal, everyone can say that this step was very successful. If you believe the platform's distribution statistics, in 2014 there were more than 1.6 billion devices in the world with this operating system, which accounted for about 75% of the entire market. With such indicators, even the leader in the production of mobile devices, Apple, which has its own iOS operating system, which is often opposed to Android, cannot compete for the market in this situation.

Although the site is open-sourced (some device manufacturers can create their own modifications of this OS), Google’s earnings on it are significant due to, for example, the same Google Play - a content store. In addition, producers using the platform must pay licensing fees.

Prospects

It is difficult to assess the full breadth of prospects that are open to such a strong player in the IT market as Google. The company is growing every day by expanding its catalog of businesses, constantly buying up the most promising startups. It is now difficult to imagine that any other brand could beat Google in the field of Internet search. We can safely say that for now, the position of this giant remains unshakable for any of its competitors, including the popular search engines Bing, Yahoo, Aol, Yandex, Baidu and others, due to certain circumstances. All over the world, the Google brand is known as a leader, and this will not change soon.

In general, you know who the founders of Google are and how they managed to create this empire. For each of us, this story can be a good lesson that everything in this life is possible. The main thing is to strive to achieve your goals and constantly work on yourself.

The mobile version of Google Docs has received a text editing function.

Company Google Inc. founded in 1998 (date of registration - September 4, 1998) by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Brin and Page met at Stanford University and began working together on a project that later became Google. According to the company's founders, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful to everyone."

Today the company has more than ten thousand employees worldwide. Brin is President of Technology and Page is President of Products.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive officer, joined Google from Novell in 2001. Under his leadership, Google significantly expanded its infrastructure and product portfolio. His extensive work experience has prepared him well to lead the development of user-centric technology solutions. Together with the company's founders and other members of the management team, Schmidt is responsible for the company's technical and business strategies.

Google's headquarters are located at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

One of the most important areas of the company’s activities is the delivery of search results (and other information) in real time.

In addition to the search engine, Google provides users with various online services. Among the most popular are Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps and others.

The company owns a popular video hosting service YouTube and the online photo editor Picasa, which allows you to process photos and create web albums from them.

Google's email service with virtually unlimited message storage, internal search, and smart anti-spam protection. It has a standard mode and a basic HTML version, which switches to automatically when logging into Gmail using a browser that is not fully supported.

Google Docs

Online application for remote collaboration on documents. Google Docs allows you to add Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or plain text files, create documents from scratch, and upload your own Internet documents; edit documents online simultaneously with any users you choose and invite other people to view those documents; publish documents on the Internet; Send documents via email as attachments.

Google Docs also allows you to work with tables, presentations and illustrations.

Google Maps

A Google service that offers user-friendly map search technology and local business information including address, contact information and driving directions. You can work with maps in three display options: satellite photographs, schematic maps, and a hybrid of the first two maps. Searching for a point by latitude and longitude is supported.

The service also includes the Google Traffic service, Google Places, mobile versions of maps, a custom map designer, etc. Using Google Street View, you can explore 3D panoramic images of various locations around the world.

Google Earth

Google Earth is a client installed on the user's computer. It lets you travel the world using a virtual globe and view satellite photos, maps, landscapes, 3D buildings and more. Google Earth also allows you to virtually explore the sky, dive into the ocean, walk on the Moon and fly to Mars.

What is Google?

A googol is a mathematical term for one followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was first described in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman.

The material was prepared based on information from the official website

Currently, Google is a large corporation known throughout the world, with multi-billion dollar annual revenue. Its popularity is also evidenced by the appearance of such slang expressions as “Google”, “Google to help”.

Of great interest is the name, the reason for the success and the very history of the company.

The company itself appeared thanks to a chance meeting of two talented graduate students in 1995 at Stanford University - Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Sergei Brin grew up in a Moscow family of mathematicians who immigrated to the United States for permanent residence in 1979. Sergei received his bachelor's degree ahead of schedule in Mathematics and Computer Systems at the University of Maryland, and in 1993 he entered Stanford University.

Larry Page is a Midwesterner who grew up in a family of educators and received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan.

The first meeting grew first into a strong friendship, and then into scientific cooperation. The graduate students had a lot in common - both had fathers who were professors, mothers who worked in science, both of them were born in 1973, grew up with computers and loved everything related to them.

Sergey Brin worked on the problem of data mining, Larry Page dreamed of changing the world.

Having met, they began to work on a search system, the goal of which is to organize all the world's information and make it useful.

The graduate students created their first search engine from toy building blocks, ready-made computer parts borrowed from the university.

Having equipped the system with a special algorithm, called BackRub, they created a revolutionary search engine, “doomed” to success.

The search engines that existed at that time paid attention only to the number of repetitions of keywords.

Larry and Sergey's search engine was more efficient - it used a mathematical algorithm that tracked the number of links from site to site and, the more links, the higher the position in the ranking. It became immediately clear that this ranking was much better.

Realizing that the project would not achieve the required scale within the university, they decided to take a vacation, open a company and develop it.

The creators renamed the search engine and on September 15, 1997, registered it under the name Google - this is an incorrect spelling of the mathematical term meaning one followed by one hundred zeros.

In the beginning, Google was a simple search engine, and the company itself was located in a small garage.

And now, after 20 years of work, Google has become the world's vacuum cleaner, sucking up digital data. It processes more than 20 petabytes of data every day, which is equal to 130 billion photos or 5 billion tracks, and also processes 1 billion search queries per day.

Thus, the name of the company justified itself, and the dreams of two ambitious students became a reality!

Even 20 years ago it was still difficult to imagine that computers would become so firmly entrenched in the everyday life of every person.

Work, relax, communicate - all this can be done using a device with Internet access. And being on the World Wide Web and not knowing what Google is is the same as living in Paris and missing the Eiffel Tower.

Advanced search technologies and a huge number of useful services have made this company the true king of the Internet.

Who do you need to be to conquer the world? For some, this will require an army of well-trained soldiers, and for others, beauty. But nowadays more and more people are gaining recognition and respect for their intelligence.

Many biographies of famous personalities contain descriptions of ordinary guys who started creating in their own garage. All they had initially were brains with bright ideas.

The history of Google began with these young people, ready to work hard to bring their plans to life:

The path from zero to billions

There is a deep domestic trace in the formation and development of Google. The talented mathematician Sergei Brin, who emigrated to the United States at the age of five, was at the very beginning of the company and still manages it today:

To understand the amazing transformation from “nothing” to a giant at the forefront of modern technology, it is necessary to note the most important stages in the development of Google.

• 1995 Sergey Brin volunteered to give a tour of Stanford University to students, one of whom was Larry Page. The student and the “tour guide” immediately began to argue about everything in the world, which became the basis for further strong friendship and the same cooperation;
• 1996 Development of a search system, the operation of which was based on PageRank technology, the essence of which is the ranking of sites depending on the link juice obtained using backlinks. This technology was a real revolution, since previously the main criterion for search engines was the number of keywords on a resource page;
• 1997 Google has found its name. It’s simply impossible to imagine how much information there is on the World Wide Web, so Sergey and Larry decided to choose as the name the number that is closest to “ it's impossible to imagine how much" A googol is a hundred zeros added to one. The spelling of the word was slightly corrected for euphony;
• August 1998. The only question Andy Bechtolsteim (one of the founders of Sun) was: " In whose name should the check be written??. One hundred thousand dollars went to the account of the not yet born Google Inc;
• September 1998. The company moves to its first office - a garage. There are already 3 employees on staff.
• February 1999. The company already has 8 people and rents an office in Palo Alto.
• September 1999. Moving to our own building located in Mountain View.
• year 2000. Google signs an agreement with Yahoo, becoming the main provider of information search services and the largest search engine in the world.
• year 2001. The company expanded its influence in South America. The search engine's index includes 3 billion documents.
• 2002 A new office opens in Sydney.
• 2003 Google buys Pyra Labs, whose most famous technology was Blogger.
• 2004 The main office is moving to a new building, the number of employees has increased to 800 people. Google goes public for the first time, offering its shares on NASDAQ. Larry Page and Sergey Brin become billionaires.

Subsequently, things went better and better for Google, and today it is no longer possible to imagine using the Internet without the popular services that the company has developed.

Services we can't live without

Throughout its existence, Google wasted no time. The company has developed a huge number of useful services, the most popular of which should at least be listed:

• Google+ is a social network launched in 2011. A distinctive feature is the Google Circles system:

• Google Docs is a service that allows you to create text documents, tables and presentations. Data can be saved in cloud storage;
• Google Drive is a virtual drive on which you can store up to 15 GB of your own information and access it from anywhere in the world:

• AdSense – contextual advertising that is automatically placed according to the topic of the page;
• Analytics is a tool for developers and SEO optimizers. Provides detailed statistics on the operation of a web resource:

• Gmail – email;
• Maps – geographic maps with which you can easily calculate the route to your destination:

• News – news generated from the headlines of the most popular publications in the world. The composition of categories is displayed according to user preferences;
• Play – game application store;
• Picasa is a service that allows you to work with images.

Your personal browser

One of the company's outstanding achievements was the creation of the Google Chrome browser, which immediately proved to be competitive in a market where, it would seem, there could be no competition.

Die Geschichte von Google begann 1995 an der Stanford University. Larry Page überlegte, an der Uni Stanford zu studieren, und Sergey Brin, der bereits Student dort war, sollte ihm den Campus zeigen.

Einigen Erzählungen zufolge konnten sie sich während ihres ersten Treffens auf schier gar nichts einigen – doch schon im folgenden Jahr begannen sie ihre Zusammenarbeit. In ihren Wohnheimzimmern entwickelten sie eine Suchmaschine, die mithilfe von Links die Wichtigkeit einzelner Webseiten im World Wide Web ermittelte, und nannten diese BackRub.

Kurze Zeit später wurde BackRub (zum Glück!) in Google umbenannt. Dieser Name basiert auf einem Wortspiel mit der mathematischen Bezeichnung für die Ziffer 1 mit 100 Nullen und steht für die Mission von Brin und Page, die Informationen der Welt zu organisieren und für alle zu jeder Zeit zugänglich und nutzbar zu machen.

Im Laufe der nächsten Jahre begann sich nur die akademische Welt für Google zu interessieren, sondern auch Investoren im Silicon Valley wurden auf die Suchmaschine aufmerksam. Im August 1998 stellte Andreas von Bechtolsheim, einer der Gründer von Sun Microsystems, Brin und Page einen Scheck über 100.000 $ aus. Google Inc. wurde offiziell registriert. Dank dieser Investition zog das neu eingetragene Unternehmen aus dem Studentenwohnheim in sein erstes Büro – die Garage von Susan Wojcicki (Mitarbeiterin Nr. 16 und aktuell CEO von YouTube) im kalifornischen Menlo Park. Klobige Desktop-Computer, eine Tischtennisplatte und leuchtend blaue Auslegware bestimmten nun die Arbeit von den frühen Morgen- bis in die späten Abendstunden. Die Tradition einer Arbeitsumgebung hält bis heute an.

Bei Google ging es von Anfang an eher unkonventionell zu: Der erste Server wurde aus Legosteinen gebaut, und das erste "Doodle"(1998) bestand aus einem Strichmännchen im Logo, das Besucher der Website darauf hinwies, dass sich das gesamte Team freigenommen hatte und zum Burning Man Festival gefahren war. Unser Leitsatz "Tu nichts Böses" und " Unsere zehn Grundsätze" reflektieren unsere unkonventionellen Methoden. In den folgenden Jahren begann das Unternehmen, rasch zu expandieren, stellte Informatiker ein, baute ein Vertriebsteam auf und begrüßte mit Yoshka den ersten Google-Hund im Team. Die Garage wurde schnell zu klein, und Google zog in seinen derzeitigen Unternehmenssitz, den Googleplex im kalifornischen Mountain View, um. Der Wunsch, die Dinge anders anzugehen, zog mit.

Die unablässige Suche nach besseren Antworten steht nach wie vor im Mittelpunkt unseres gesamten Schaffens. Inzwischen beschäftigt Google über 60.000 Mitarbeiter in 50 verschiedenen Ländern und stellt Hunderte Produkte her, die von Milliarden Menschen weltweit genutzt werden, von YouTube über Android bis hin zu Gmail und natürlich der Google-Suche. Obwohl wir die Lego-Server abgeschafft und uns noch ein paar Hunde zugelegt haben, hat sich auf unserem Weg von der Garage zum Googleplex bis heute eins nicht geändert: Wir wollen weiter Technologien für alle Menschen entwickeln.