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