At Stanford University in 1995, the Google story first begins. Sergey Brin, a current student at Stanford, was chosen to give Larry Page a tour while he was considering the university for graduate study.
According to some accounts, they didn't agree on much during that initial meeting, but by the following year they had formed a partnership. They developed a search engine from their dorm rooms that used links to gauge the significance of particular Web pages. This search engine was given the name Backrub.
Backrub was renamed Google shortly after that (phew). The name, which was a pun on the mathematical formula for 1 followed by 100 zeros, perfectly encapsulated Larry and Sergey's goal of "organising the world's information and making it broadly accessible and useful."
Over the following few years, Google attracted the interest of Silicon Valley investors in addition to the academic community. Google Inc. was founded when Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, gave Larry and Sergey a $100,000 check in August 1998. With this investment, the newly formed team was able to upgrade from the dorms to their first office, which was located in Susan Wojcicki's garage in the California suburb of Menlo Park (employee no.16 and now CEO of YouTube). The environment for those early mornings and late nights was comprised of clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and a bright blue carpet. (The practise of keeping things colourful is still practised today.)
From Google's first server, which was made of Lego, to the first "Doodle" in 1998, which featured a stick figure in the logo to inform site visitors that the entire staff was taking a day off to attend the Burning Man Festival, things were unusual from the start. Don't be evil perfectly encapsulated the spirit of our purposefully unconventional approaches. The business quickly grew in the years that followed, adding engineers, a sales team, and Yoshka, the first canine employee. When Google outgrew the garage, it eventually relocated to The Googleplex in Mountain View, California, where it now has its current headquarters. The decision was made in the spirit of trying something new. Yoshka also did.
The constant pursuit of better solutions remains at the centre of everything we do. Today, Google produces hundreds of products, including YouTube, Android, Gmail, and, of course, Google Search, that are used by billions of people worldwide. Our enthusiasm for creating technology for everyone has remained with us from the dorm room to the garage and even to the present day, despite the removal of the Lego servers and the addition of a few more company dogs.
Source: About Google
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