Google

Organizing the world’s information

David Maish | 08.05.16 Essay 02 | Digital Revolution

Professor David Meyers IXDS5403 Media History and Theory MA Interaction Design | Lindsey Wilson College

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

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BEGINNINGS It all started as a research project. In 1996, two Stanford University Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Serge Brin were exploring dissertation themes.

Larry Page had been considering mathematical properties of the world wide web and understanding the web’s link structure by using a gigantic graph for the project.

It was through this school of thought that they developed a technology called “PageRank.” This enabled them to create a search engine that could estimate a website’s importance based on its incoming links.

Their search engine would initially be called BackRub, but soon Page and Brin would change the name of the engine to “Google” a play on the word “googol” which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

So on September 15, 1997 the Google.com domain name was registered and a year later they became incorporated.

Google.com went public on August 19, 2004. Page, Brin and Eric Schmidt (CEO) remained in control of the company. As a result of Google’s IPO, a large number of its employees became instant “paper millionaires.”

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Larry Page and Serge Brin in their Menlo Park “Garage Office.” Image source: hongkiat.com

G

Googleplex Headquarters. Image source: Wikipedia

GOOGLEPLEX Like many Silicon Valley startups,

But Google’s most popular service

Google was first based out of a garage;

is “Google Search,” its online search

today, Googlepex is the corporate

engine. Users look for information by

headquarters complex of Google, Inc.

typing keywords into the search bar.

It is located at 1600 Amphitheater

Incoming results come from billions and

Parkway in Mountain View, California.

billions of webpages that Google

The Google offices are well known for

indexes. To this day, the order of the

an informal and casual atmosphere.

results are still partly based on PageRank.

Google employees are encouraged to spend approximately 20 per cent of their time on their own personal interests, and this has led to the creation of services such as Google AdSense and Google News.

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PRODUCTS Google has also developed a number

store them in the cloud. The

of internet productivity tools. The most

documents are created and edited with

well-known of these is Gmail. Gmail

a web browser and can be accessed by

emerged as the first free webmail

more than one user. This online

service to keep emails from the same

software is considered by many as a

exchange collectively in a common

direct attack on Microsoft.

thread. Gmail was also the first email service to offer one gigabyte of free

Google Chrome, an open source web

storage. Today Gmail offers unlimited

browser and Android, Google’s mobile

storage for a small fee.

operating system and phone, as well as Youtube and Google Maps are also part

Google Docs is another service offered

by Google. It is an online software that allows users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and

of the product line at Google.

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CONCLUSION Over the years Google has drawn

Since Google’s beginning they have

criticism for privacy issues concerning

focused on providing the best user

automatic email scanning of Gmail for

experience possible.

targeted advertising as well as data and image collection for Google Street View. The Google search engine has also been criticized for censorship of search results.

But one thing is for sure. Google will continue to better its products and strive to develop new products that help you be more productive.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators; How a Group of Hackers Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. https://www.google.com/ https://www.google.com/about/ https://www.google.com/doodle http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/classic-pictures-giant-tech-companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google http://www.watchmojo.com Father’s Day - 2016