Published 18:19 IST, September 4th 2020
Google was founded on this day in 1998; know the Stanford university students behind it
The world’s most successful dot-com search engine Google was founded after the stanford students one day created an algorithm to solve a computer task.
- Tech
- 3 min read
On this day in history, September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin found the Internet search engine Google while they were still the graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The world’s most successful dot-com search engine was founded after the duo one day created an algorithm to solve a computer task and it ended up searching all the hypertext documents available in cyberspace related to the term. They came up with the idea to create a search tool that will list relevant Web pages by analyzing backlinks" in a hypertext document, or how many times other sites linked to it as opposed to the search engine Hot Bot, popular in the 90s that curated all search results including the irrelevant ones, encyclopedia of world biography reports.
Citing the TIME interview then, it said that the founders wanted their search technology to be different. The search engine should treat the Internet as a democracy. Google interprets connections between websites as votes. The most linked-to sites win on the Google usefulness ballot and rise to the top of the search results, encyclopedia cited excerpts of TIME interview with the duo. "I hope they will be able to return answers, not just documents. In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge—not just web pages,” The Guardian quoted Sergey Brin as saying in the November 2000 interview in London, England. According to the report, Page and Brin's unique algorithm was initially named “Backrub, then changed to “PageRank,” as the search engine grew popular with Stanford users. While the popularity skyrocketed, more and more servers were needed, Page revealed in the US media reports, adding, they’d check who had got 20 computers and request for one to use at dorm rooms at Stanford. That’s where Page's room was a data hub and Brin’s initial office of today’s Google.
One billion Internet URLs
Searches shot past 10,000 a day, Page was quoted saying by Newsweek. Further, the report quoted Brin as saying that the two spent $15,000 on a terabyte [one million megabytes] of discs on three credit cards. Having raised more money from friends, family, and then from venture capital firms, the two eventually set up the headquarters in an office park in Mountain View. The duo licensed PageRank technology to pay the firms to students that started yahoo.com and David Filo and named the company “Google," after the mathematical term Googol. In June of 2000, Google attained a hallmark of one billion Internet URLs and became the number one search engine on the Web. By 2004 Google became the world’s most-visited Web sites indexing 138,000 search queries per minute.
Updated 18:18 IST, September 4th 2020