When you think of Google today, it’s really hard to imagine a world without it. Everyone here relies on quick answers and deep research, and Google ranks first in this category. Did you know it was a mistake when the world’s largest search engine became a tech giant?
The Birth Of Google
In the late 1990s, the internet was rapidly growing, and so was the need for a way to make sense of all of this. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the two PhD students at Stanford University who noticed that search engines of the time were insufficient at ranking websites based on their relevance. Most of the time, they return results that don’t match what people seek.
In 1996, both started working on the project called BackRub, which was designed to analyze the backlinks between websites to determine how important it is for a website to rank web pages smarter by considering how many other websites are linked back to them. They wanted to create a search engine that prioritized content and results. The vision was clear: to organize world information and make it available at the university level.
The Mistake That Changed the Internet
So finally, both of them in 1998 became successful with the BackRub project; they were all set to take their search engine to the next level. They renamed their project to something catchy: Google, a playful twist on the mathematical term googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. They both like this name because it reflects their goal to handle massive amounts of data.
Google Fund Raise
At the time, they needed funding to keep their project alive. Larry and Sergey approached several investors, and one of them was their friend or their faculty advisor, Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim was quite impressed with the demo given by Larry and Sergey. He wrote them a cheque for $100,000 on the spot but by the name of Google Inc., which didn’t exist.
Both had to scramble and officially create Google Inc. to cash the cheque. What seemed like a mistake became one of their life’s biggest opportunities. With that funding, they launched Google officially in September 1998.
Now, we all know that Google is a masterpiece. The story of Google is one of innovation, persistence, and a bit of luck. What started as a mistake with $100,000 has become a global empire that touches almost every aspect of our lives. Google’s journey of the world’s most valuable companies is a reminder that sometimes the best things come from unexpected beginnings.
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