Google celebrated its 14th birthday

The history of Google begins in 1996. It was then that Larry Page and Sergey Brin,students at Stanford University, began working together on a training project - the search system "BackRub", on the basis of which Google was later created. The system used the PageRank ranking algorithm.

Breen and Page managed to develop the idea and drawInvestments to turn a university project into a business. So in September 1998, Google was officially founded. This name comes from the word "googol" (English googol), which means ten to the hundredth degree (one with one hundred zeros). By the way, google.com domain was registered before the company was founded in September 1997. Prior to this, the search engine was on the Stanford University website and had the address google.stanford.edu.

By the end of 1998, about 60 million pages had been indexed by the new search engine. In 2012 Google indexed more 30 trillion web pages, 100 billion requests per month.

For fourteen years, Google has managed to break into world leaders, becoming the first popular search engine, which processes more than half of all searchrequests in the world. As of July 2012, the company employs 34,300 employees - and if only Google is directly counted, another 20.3 thousand employees work for Motorola, which recently belongs to Google.

In the past two weeks there has been an active growth of Google shares on NASDAQ. On Tuesday, September 25, the company's securities were fixed historical for Google record price - $ 764.89 per share. At the auction on Wednesday, September 26, the company's sharesclosed at $ 753.46 per share. For comparison: the Chinese search engine Baidu, this figure is 112.19 dollars, the domestic search engine "Yandex" (by the way, recently celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the launch) - 23.35 dollars.

In addition to the mass tools for web search, Google provides users and a number of other products, which include: advertising services, mail service Gmail, social network Google+, tools for web developers, cartographic services, web statistics tools and many other products. Also Google owns popular YouTube video hosting. As you can see, not all Google products are directly related to web search.

Engaged in Google and software development. So, among his "children" - Google Chrome browser,a free program for working with digital images Picasa, application Google Earth, etc. Also Google is developing the operating systems Android and Google Chrome OS. One of the company's latest developments is the hardware and software platform Google TV, which expands the access to online content.

Joining with selected hardware manufacturers, Google released a number of devices under the general name of Nexusoperating on the Android operating system. "The first swallow" was a smartphone Nexus One, developed in conjunction with HTC. It was released in January in 2010. Together with Samsung, Google released smartphones Nexus S (December 2010) and Galaxy Nexus (November 2011). And in June 2012, the first tablet in the series Nexus - Nexus 7, developed in conjunction with Asus, was introduced.

In fourteen years of existence Corporation of Good (one of the names Google) experienced ups andfalls: some projects failed, but a much larger number of projects and services turned out to be quite successful, and the majority of active Internet users can not imagine their network life without them.