Google acquisition and investment map

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Back in January 1996 Google began as a research project for Larry Page, a PHD student at Stanford, who was working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). It was his aim "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." In his search for a dissertation theme, Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the web, understanding its link structure as huge graph. His supervisor at the time, Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick up this idea, and Page was later quoted as saying this was "the best advice I ever got."

With his research project, which was nicknamed 'BackRub', Page was soon joined by close friend Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PHD student. Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as a starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. Analyzing BackRub's output - which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance - it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques.

Originally, the search engine used the Stanford website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain of google.com was registered on 15 September 1997, and the company was formally incorporated on 4 September 1998. The name of 'Google' originated from a mis-spelling of 'googol', which refers to the number represented by a one followed by one-hundred zeros. August 1998 saw the first funding for Google as a company when it received a US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The homepage may have still been marked 'BETA', but an article in Salon.com argued that Google's search results were better than competitors such as Hotbot and Excite.com

In 1999, Google moved into their Mountain View headquarters, where they still remain today. The Google search engine started to build a loyal following from those that liked its simple design. By June 1999, a round of equity funding, which totaled US$25 million had been announced.

2000 saw Google begin to sell advertisements based on keywords, which is known as Google AdWords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. It wasn't until Google started to offer AdWords, that it started to make any money.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine, Google News.October saw Microsoft approaching Google for a possible partnership or merger, yet nothing ever materialized. January 2004 saw Google hiring Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO projected to raise as much as US$4 billion. Later in the year, in April, Google made an S-1 form SEC filling for an IPO to raise more than US$2 billion.

As Google increased in size, it developed a long-term and well-documented rivalry with software giant Microsoft. Great competition between both company's search engines and applications soon arose and many Microsoft employees, recognizing the innovation and cutting edge style of Google's operations, left Microsoft to join the California-based company.

None of these were more notable than Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice-president of Microsoft, who quit to join Google's operations in China back in 2005. Microsoft tried to sue Lee, but the case was settled out of court in December of that year.

Google's growth and presence as a giant conglomerate continued with a further acquisition in January 2006, following the purchase of the radio advertising company, dMarc. In the same year, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online collaborative work processor, Writely and the technology in this was combined with Google Spreadsheets to become what we now know Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

In October 2006, the company announced that it had bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion. By the end of 2007 the company had acquired four more companies, Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, Adscape Media, PeakStream Technologies and DoubleClick - potentially their most lucrative acquisition to date.

Page and Brin are currently ranked 26th on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires. They are the 6th richest people in America. Not bad for something that started out a side project. Meanwhile, as a company, Google simply continues to grow, expand, develop and dominate.

Source: Meettheboss.com