(19 Sep 2018) LEADIN
Twenty years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to organize all of the internet's information, the search engine they named Google has morphed into a dominating force in smartphones, online video, email, maps and much more.
That resounding success now has regulators and lawmakers around the world questioning whether the company has become too powerful.
STORYLINE
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on 7 September 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's 100,000 US Dollars bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
It sounded preposterous 20 years ago. However Google's parent company, Alphabet, made 9.4 billion in profit in the first three months of 2018 and is said to have over 100 billion US Dollars in cash reserves.
Page and Brin, both 45, are now two of the richest men in the world. According to Forbes, Page has a net worth of 48.8 billion US dollars and Brin 47.5 billion US Dollars.
Despite many high profile controversies Page and Brin have always insisted they view Google as a force for good - a philosophy punctuated by their corporate motto: "Don't Be Evil."
It all began in September 1998, when Page and Brin decided to convert their research project in Stanford University's computer science graduate programme into a formal company.
Page and Brin began working on a search engine - originally called BackRub - in 1996 because they believed a lot of important content wasn't being found on the Web. At the time, the companies behind the Internet's major search engines - Yahoo, AltaVista and Excite - were increasingly focused on building multifaceted Web sites.
Internet search was considered such a low priority at the time that Page and Brin couldn't even find anyone willing to pay a couple of million dollars to buy their technology. Instead, they got a 100,000 US Dollars investment from one of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, and filed incorporation papers so they could cash a check made out to Google Inc.
In a nod to their geeky roots as children of computer science and math professors, Page and Brin had derived the name from the mathematical term "googol" - a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Later they would raise a total of about 26 million US Dollars from family, friends and venture capitalists to help fund the company and pay for now-famous employee perks like free meals and snacks.
Even after Google became an official company in 1998, the business continued to operate out of the founders' Stanford dorm rooms.
Like Google's stripped-down home page, the company itself had a bare-bones aesthetic. Page's room was converted into a "server farm" for the three computers that ran the search engine, which then processed about 10,000 requests per day.
The headquarters were in Brin's room in a neighboring dorm hall and the company's first employee, and later it's technoology director, Craig Silverstein worked on code on another computer.
Within a few weeks after incorporating, Google moved into the garage of a Menlo Park, California home owned by Susan Wojcicki, who became a Google executive and is now Brin's sister-in-law (Google bought the house in 2006).
At its core, Google indexes the entire web - some hundreds of billions of pages - using programs called web crawlers.
These bots collect descriptions of pages and their incoming links and save this information in Google's data centers. When you search on Google, it scans this index - which is more than 100 million gigabytes large - to quickly provide what it thinks are the most relevant results.
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