Larry Page, Sergey Brin Google History 1 - YouTube | |
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21. Nov. 2010 - 5 Min. - Hochgeladen von storiesofusa
http://storiesofusa.com/greatest-american-entrepreneurs-and-business-professi... - Larry Page, Sergey Brin ... | |
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Excite's rejection of Google Offer for 1 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite
According to Justin Rohrlich, writing for Minyanville.com, later in 1999, two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that Google,
the search engine they had developed, was taking up time they should
have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1
million, but Bell rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla,
one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of his office after he had
negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Excite's refusal to buy what
became a $180 billion company by 2010 was labeled by Rohrlich a "stupid
business decision".[3]
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GOOGLE HISTORY - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
Early history
Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies.[2][3][4][5] In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[6] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[7]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[6] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.[2] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[6] Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point.[6] To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[6] Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[6][8]A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[9] The technology in RankDex would be patented [10] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[11][12]
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:[13]
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
-Larry Page pagecs.stanford.edu
Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.[14]
By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.[15] The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.[15]
Financing and initial public offering
The first funding for Google as a company was secured on August 1998 in the form of a $100,000USD contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.[24]On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced;[25] the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[24]
While Google still needed a lot of funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public even though that would basically solve most of their financial issues. They were not ready to give up their control over Google. After borrowing the $25 million venture capital money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, Sequoia forced Brin and Page to hire a CEO or else they would take back that borrowed $12.5 million. Finally, Brin and Page gave in and hired Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in March 2001 and the company went public three years later.[26]
In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares (IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger.[27] However, no such deal ever materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.
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