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1-Page Summary of The Google Story

A Bargain Offer

If Stanford University had offered to sell Google’s search technology for a million dollars, would you have found a way to buy it? Yahoo and other companies passed on the opportunity. The lack of interest in buying this new product made Sergey Brin and Larry Page realize that they needed to build their own business around it. They named the company after misspelling googol (1 with 100 zeroes), which represents an almost endless amount of information available online, thanks to Google’s search engine. From the outset, Google was different because of its PageRank feature, which analyzes billions of pages and then ranks them based on how likely they are to be useful for someone searching online.

Google’s success is due to its hard work. The young founders, who are now billionaires, were able to find the right tools and equipment for their project when they needed them. When Stanford University couldn’t support Google anymore, it was time for other investors to step in. One of those investors was Andy Bechtolsheim, a brilliant technologist who put in $100,000 into the company. With this money and others’, Google became an incorporated company with credibility among venture capitalists such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and David Filo (Yahoo).

Two men needed money, but didn’t want to give up their trade secrets or lose control of their business. Eventually, they found investors who gave them $25 million in investments while maintaining control. The pair then had to figure out how to make money with the technology.

The Right Path

Brin and Page had no interest in creating a standard company. Their offices looked more like student dorm rooms than corporate headquarters. They also struggled with the decision to sell advertising, but they eventually decided against it because they didn’t want their search results to be corrupted by ads. However, they couldn’t license their technology or get companies to pay fees for searches, so they tried another idea: selling ads on Google’s website itself.

Google was founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were interested in advertising, so they started a company that showed ads on the right-hand side of search results pages. The ads ranked based on how much advertisers paid for them and how often users clicked on those links. This new way to rank advertisements gave advertisers more control over their ad campaigns because they could see which ones worked best before spending more money on them.

Google was a small company in 2001, and its financial results were not impressive. Investors wanted the company to hire an experienced executive. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t want to lose control of their company or report to anyone else, but they finally agreed that Google should bring Eric Schmidt on board as CEO. The three men complemented each other’s talents: Page handled technology, Schmidt dealt with the business world, and Brin made deals for Google. As Google grew larger, it formed crucial strategic alliances such as providing searches for AOL and ad services for Ask Jeeves. Both deals generated huge traffic for Google; by 2002 it had turned over more than $400 million with $100 million in profits.

News and Gmail

Google became a worldwide phenomenon. It spread by word-of-mouth and made people’s lives easier. People searched in many languages, including joke ones such as Klingon and Elmer Fudd. They also used Google to work faster and more efficiently than before.

Google encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time on projects they’re interested in. This policy has yielded many great ideas, including Google News and the Google Product Search. The latter lets users search for anything they want to buy online. However, Gmail is the most well-known product created by this policy because it was announced as a joke on April Fool’s Day, but ended up becoming one of Google’s most popular products ever.