Google it |

Last week Google shares reached an all time high of $1000 after it
posted a third-quarter surge in profit and revenue. And because analysts
have boosted their target on Google shares, who knows how high shares
will go.

In 1996, PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working together on a research project that involved developing a search
engine they eventually entitled BackRub. This search engine
was designed to look at the connecting links between web pages
in order to determine a site's authority. In 1998, Page and
Brin set up their first data center in Page's dorm. They decided to start a
company and started looking for investors to back them. Andy
Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested
$100,000 in the company after receiving a demo of their search
technology. Eventually the pair raised over $1M. Google,
Inc. was established on September 7, 1998 in a
friend's garage
in Menlo Park, California. The company name Google is
based on a mathematical term that is actually spelled "googol" which
means the number "1" followed by 100 zeros.
Apparen'tly they had no idea how to spell it and came up with the word
"google" instead.

In the beginning Google served over 10,000 queries a
day and quickly gained a reputation as a trustworthy source
of information. By 1999, it was serving 500,000 queries a day
and the company moved their business from that garage in Menlo Park
to the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Users began flocking to Google as news of their reliability, speed, effectiveness and relavance spread. In
2000, Google replaced Yahoo's own internal search engine as
the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. Now,
with more than 50% share of the total search market, Google
provides search results for numerous search engines on the web.

To read more about Google and its founders take a look at these books and DVDs: