DW: Google Turns 20: In Search of Next Multibillion-Dollar Company

• 09.04.2018, 11:34
•  World,  No-politics

google.com

From a humble beginning in Stanford dorm rooms, Google has emerged as one of the biggest internet successes. But growing competition, overreliance on ad revenues and privacy concerns pose new challenges for the company, DW reports.

It all started with a chance encounter.

Larry Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, was visiting Stanford University to figure out if he would be taking admission in the prestigious institute. Taking him around the campus was a certain Sergey Brin, a student in the computer science department at the university.

The two hardly clicked; debating and disagreeing about nearly everything.

But a year later, working out of their dorm rooms, the two came together to build a search engine, BackRub, that showed results by ranking the trove of documents on the World Wide Web based on relevance.

The search engine was soon renamed Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google soon caught the attention of Silicon Valley investors, including German co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, who invested $100,000 (€86,000) in the search engine in August 1998.

It marked the birth of Google Inc. With fresh funding under their belts, Page and Brin moved their base to a garage — Google's first office. The garage was owned by Susan Wojcicki, the current chief executive of YouTube, a Google unit.