Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing was the son of university professor and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, while his mother was a teacher of computer programming at the Michigan State University. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia. Brin’s father was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother was a research scientist at NASA's Goddard.
The research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.
The first web search services were based on line directories, such as catalogs. This solution was proved inefficient, as the content available in the Internet became more complex and extensive. In this context, in 1997, Sergey Brin and Larry Page initiated the development of their own search engine algorithm and index, which later would be called PageRank.
Google algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of the Page Ranks of the pages linking to them. PageRank is thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance.
Within the next few years, the prototype system had been converted into progressively improved versions, and these were substantially more effective than any other search engine then available.
Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at on their system. They named their successor search engine Google, in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term googol, which is the immense large number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google was incorporated as a privately held company in 1998 and opened its door as a business entity in September 1998, operating out of modest facilities in a Menlo Park, California garage.
After receiving in 1999 investments of US$ 25 million from two venture capital firms, during 2000, Google becomes the largest search engine on the web, with the more than 1 million home unique URLs (universal resource locators).
Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google Ad Words program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money makers for search engines.
Early Google history
