History of Computers - Google

Introduction

Google is one of, if not the, most visited website on the internet. Google is a search engine that has become synonymous with searching the internet. Some people have been known to call a computer simply, “The Google machine.”

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, 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 pages importance by the number of backlinks. The 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 was born Google Inc. Google quickly became a massive hit, and by 1998 it had indexed over 60 million pages.

Significance

Google has quickly become one of the most powerful players on the internet, and has revolutionized the way people search the internet. In 2006, the Merriam Webster and Oxford dictionaries 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 “search it on the internet” and Google has become the top way to do that searching.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Philanthropy http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html