GOOGLE: THE BUSINESS, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS OF OUR TIME

A mere dozen years ago Larry Page and Sergey Brin met by chance at Stanford University. The occasion was a student orientation. Brin had been a grad student there for two years and Page was just enrolling. They are both the product of esteemed fathers who were professors themselves. The two young geniuses began research on several specific projects including the one that would launch their giant corporation. They hypothesized a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. In their relatively short coporate life they have achieved greatness. They acquired dozens of applicable technology companies and have also developed associations and licensing agreements with companies in many many countries around the world, including China Telephone.

They now have on staff 10,674 employees worldwide, after beginning with only 3 original staff members in 1998. Most of Google's revenue is derived from advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and US$112 million in licensing and other revenues

Google's post-IPO stock performance has been very good as well, with shares hitting US$700 for the first time on October 31, due to strong sales and earnings in the advertising market, as well as the release of new features such as the desktop search function and personalized home page. Google is well-known for its web search service, which is a major factor in the company's success. As of August 2007, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 53.6% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (19.9%) and Live Search (12.9%). In a 2007 report of the United States' richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tied for #5 with a net worth of US$18.5 billion each.

There is so much that has been written about these young tigers of the internet, but one the most recent and best is “The Google Story” by David A. Vise.