“He Who Seeks… Finds in Google..!!” This phrase says enough about the impact that Google has made on our lives. In the past few years, Google has taken over the World Wide Web by storm, overtaking a number of big market players in terms of revenues, and becoming the first company to cross the market capital of US $100 billion. Whether it is about searching, social networking, blogging, maps, mailing, Instant messengers, browsers or mobile applications, brand Google is everywhere. And its not just about the presence, Google is earning kudos from the technical as well as non technical communities, and has truly enabled a faster global advancement in every respect.

World has witnessed an extraordinary evolution of Google since its inception in March 1996 as a Stanford Digital Library Project, a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their Ph.D. course at Stanford University. Larry Page and Sergey Brin added their names to the list of exceptional brains who were university or college dropouts. List includes names like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, etc. Quite ironical!

Nicknamed “BackRub”, Page’s web crawler began exploring the web, with Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point. Stanford Computer Science Center, where the “BackRub” project started, was considerably funded by Bill Gates, who had invested $6 million in its development.

Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the link as google.stanford.edu. Google Inc. was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998, and started operating at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The first funding for Google was a $100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

“BackRub” was originally written in Java and Python and used several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running on Linux. The primary database was kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk space.

“BackRub” used PageRank algorithm, which used to take “number of back links” to a web page and their relevance, as a measure of importance of the web page, unlike the keywords density algorithm used by other search engine. Keyword density was directly under the control of the websites and was easily manipulated. New algorithm used by Google was very difficult to manipulate, at least initially, and proved revolutionary.

The term “Page” in “PageRank” refers to Larry Page (and you thought it’s for the web page!). Although “PageRank” relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google added more and more criteria, which will make manipulation difficult and relevance higher, to evaluate the ranking of a web page, today there are over 200 factors which are part of the ranking algorithm.

The patent for the “PageRank” algorithm does not belong to Google Inc, as commonly thought. Instead, the right to Page’s know-how of making Google is with Stanford University (Patent No. 6285999).

Sources have that Google’s simple and clean web interface was not designed that way on purpose. Instead, Page and Brin did not have enough money to hire a professional designer initially. Sometimes people used to wait for the page to fully load, without realizing that it has already happened! To take care of this Google copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page indicator.

Have a look how the original site was designed!!

* This image is courtesy Google Inc.

Google’s user traffic more than doubled when the feature “Did you mean?” was introduced. This feature is indeed a simple spelling checker but became an important milestone in Google evolution.

These days the term “Google it” has become so common that it has become a verb, and has been added in Oxford dictionary. Although it is an extraordinary achievement but Google employees themselves are not allowed this kind of usage of the brand name. The reason being, if used too often, the term may be applied to other search engines as well and will negatively impact Google’s brand.

Although specific details are not available, it is estimated that Google may be maintaining over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world.

Google supports use of around 88 languages and basic translation service, and consequently increasing its reach and usability manifolds.

As it should be, Google works in collaboration with SEO service providers and webmasters, and provides guidelines and tools for a coherent development. And the way Google is innovating and developing, we are sure to see some unthinkable things in the time to come.