History of Computers - Google
--Wirvine 15:13, 7 October 2008 (CDT)By William Irvine
Introduction
Google is one of, if not the most visited websites on the internet. Google is a rapidly growing search engine, so widely used in fact, that the word google has become almost synonymous with the word search. Some people have been known to call a computer simply, “The Google machine.” Though Google is most popular for its search engine, it offers many other features such as image searching, maps, Google Earth, and Gmail. For a full list click here.
Overview
Google began as a school research project by Larry Page in 1996. He was attempting to investigate the mathematical properties of the Internet, and was joined in the project by Sergey Brin, a close friend. The two developed a web crawler that set out from their Stanford page and recorded the number of backlinks, or the number of times a website linked to a given page, a website had. The two then developed the PageRank algorithm that would determine a page's importance by the number of backlinks. They decided that creating a web search tool that ranked pages by importance, based on the algorithm, as opposed to the number of times the search term appeared on the page would generate better results. Thus began google, which started as google.stanford.edu, but quickly became its own domain. In 1997, the company was incorporated in a garage, and thus Google Inc. was born. Google quickly became a massive hit, and by 1998 it had indexed over 60 million pages. In 2004, Google again produced a big hit with Gmail, an email service offering a massive gigabyte of storage. This figure was so incredible – 500 times that of competitor Hotmail – that its release was first assumed to be an April Fools’ prank.[1] Google has brought in so much revenue that the company has now released Google Chrome. Google Chrome, released December 11, 2008, is a web browser created by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. Google Chrome was constructed from twenty-five different code libraries with the help of third parties such as Mozilla. By August of 2012, Chrome had become the leading browser globally with 28.3% marketshare.[2]
Significance
Google has quickly become one of the most powerful players on the internet, and has revolutionized the way people search the internet. Originally, searching on the internet for various documents, previously done by dredging through the millions of files one by one, was done by using the service called Archie. In 2006, the Merriam Webster and Oxford dictionary added the verb Google, meaning to “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.” From there the term has expanded to mean “to search anything on the internet”. Google also revolutionized speech recognition as they were the first to use cloud based computing to perform all the complex analysis involved in the process.
