Google [Success Stories -1]

I m planning to write about some of the successful ventures and starting with the story of Google.

How it started...
The founders of Google didn't intend to create a search engine, when they started. In the year 1995, two Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to work on someting interesting for their Ph.D research project. They worked on understanding the Mathematical properties of the links in the world wide web pages. They designed an efficient web crawler and a page rank algorithm for this project.

When analyzing the results of their research product, it occured to them that a search engine based on this Page Ranking algorithm would give better results when compared to some of the search techniques that were available then.

Thus the research project evolved into a Web Search Engine. They named their company as Google Inc.

Initially they ran this new search engine under their university domain and on September 4, 1998 they started the company Google Inc in a friend's garage.

Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The First break
By the end of 1998, their crawler had crawled about 60 million pages but at that time there were several other popular search engines like Yahoo, Hotbot, Excite.com, Lycos etc. The same year, an article in Salon.com praised Google's search results were better than its competitors. This feeling spread, and that time period was the beginning of the dot-com bubble and Google's this search technique was seen as the future of the Web search. The rest is history!!!

Google's Home page in 1998

Google's Revenue and Growth...
as Google Search became more and more popular among the users, they introduced sponsored ads in their search results. These advertisements based upon the keywords turned out to be the treasure for Google as it constitute major portion of their revenue.

During early 2000s when many other dot-com companies were suffering to generate cash flow, Google was growing in both popularity and revenue.

The company went public on August 19, 2004 giving Google a market value of about US$23 billion.

Today's stature
They didn't stop with the search engine. They acquired Blogger (a web blog hosting company). Then they came with GMail, collaborative service named Google Docs and Spreadsheets and lot more.

Today the brand Google is one among the very few popular software companies in the world. They have achieved this in just 10 years.

Lesson for start-ups :
# Google efficiently solved a problem of the Internet users and had a powerful business model on that.
# Google was not the first to invent the web Search Engine but they were the best in that.

if you have any points/facts to add, please feel free to post them as comments. I will add them to the post.