Who Invented Google?

Google Inc. was founded by Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, a Soviet- born computer scientist, and Lawrence “Larry” Page, an American computer scientist in September, 1998. Google, the search engine, was created in March, 1996 in the Stanford University. Both Sergey and Larry were PhD students then. Their search engine was then known as BackRub. The following year (1997), they decided to change the name and decided on ‘Google’. Googol is number which means one followed by a hundred zeros.

Financing was a big problem in the early days. The situation, however, eased a little when Andy Bechtoldsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, decided to give Google $100,000 in 1998. Google established its office and hired its first employee in the same year. In 2000 Google was released in ten more languages – French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. This was soon followed by Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of Google, which gave a tint of internationality or universality, as Google would prefer!

Three years later, was announced the creation of Google Books. Initially it was known as Launch Google Print. 2004 saw the emergence of Orkut, a social networking site, and Google Earth. In the same year, the index of web pages with Google reached a record 8 billion. This followed more acquisitions and more mergers and the company is still growing.

The ride, however, hasn’t been smooth. Google is still far from being truly international. It is still not the biggest search provider in Japan, South Korea and China. Its decision to digitize millions of books has sparked a new controversy – is it safe for a single company to handle the entire knowledge in the world? The most recent one has been Google’s decision to pull out of China. The reasons vary depending upon who you listen to – the Chinese government or the Google bosses! In spite of all this, Google still seems to be getting stronger.

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