The creation of Google
Author: Andy Source: See the World
Google is a gateway to 3 billion web pages, but its homepage is unusually simple : The entire page only has 37 English words, 4 tab characters and a rectangular space for filling in query information. At best, you can only type 10 words. At Google, there are more than 10,000 Internet-connected computers indexing these 3 billion web pages, using an equation with 500 million variables to sort these pages. It can calculate thousands of page lists at a time, and the sorting time is only It takes 500 milliseconds; at peak times, these computers were capable of processing 7 million query tasks per hour.
In just five years, Google has grown from an experimental project trying to better implement online search functions to a vibrant company with huge advertising potential and a key player in connecting the Internet. "Master Key". The edge completely overshadows browsers such as Explorer and portals such as Yahoo.
Today, as a search engine deeply loved by users, Google has not only won the favor of thousands of advertisers, but also won the covetation of Wall Street, and even attracted the jealousy and even curse of many competitors.
The inseparable Google complex
Sergey Brin and Larry Page never thought that their careers would develop so much. "Of course, I'm amazed by what we've accomplished," Brin said modestly. He was slender and dressed casually. The sneakers on his feet were worn on the chair in the conference room, and the leather of the chair was worn out.
To tell the history of Google, we have to go back to 1995, when Brin and Page first met at Stanford University. Their fathers were both university mathematics teachers. The two guys noticed that searching was a very interesting problem when organizing very large data sets.
At that time, users could type in a few words and find thousands of lists of web pages containing that word, but most of them had nothing to do with the user's query requirements. Brin and Page ranked such randomly appearing web pages and judged the importance of a website by analyzing how many websites were willing to link to it. They will give the result page a "Page Rank". Later, calculation methods for sorting using other variables were added, making this sorting method more powerful.
Soon, the two computer science graduate students discovered that their results query method was superior to any other search. So they called this system the "back touch method," after the "back links" that point to websites. In 1997, they adopted the name Google, in honor of a numerical measurement method called googol, a number followed by 100 zeros. There is no infinite atom in the universe. Employees at the company's headquarters jokingly call it the "Googleplex" because there are countless zeros behind it, symbolizing that it is an infinite number.
At the World Wide Web Conference held in April 1998, Brin and Page introduced Google to the world in the form of a paper.
Soon, the two began selling the technology to other websites, including Infoseek, Excite and Yahoo. Only to find that no one was interested. Later, they invited them and Andres Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun, to have breakfast on the campus of Stanford University. Halfway through the presentation, Bechtolsheim interrupted them and wrote a check for $100,000 to Google on the spot.
In this way, another problem arises: Google does not yet have a bank account, or even a "Google company" at all. After the check sat in a drawer for a few weeks, they started to think more seriously about it.
As of June 1999, Google had raised $30 million in start-up capital through investment from investment companies such as Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & byers, Stanford University and individual investors. Three months later, the Google website was officially launched. At that time, 30 million web pages could be viewed.
Today it can browse 100 times more pages than before.
Under the threat of competitors, entrepreneurs gave way to professional managers
Brin said that the reason why users love Google is because when they urgently need to find an answer, they always Can be found on Google. Only by continuously providing better search results can you keep them loyal to you and then sell to them. "For users, Google has become 'a person', a person who provides them with information every moment," Page added. "Passion and success have made Google unprecedentedly powerful, and its emergence has brought about a new dimension to the Internet." Let’s get a new look.”
Just when Google began to prosper, the online world collapsed, but it was a lucky thing for the two entrepreneurs of Google. As many Internet companies collapsed, Google took over some cheaper offices, some aluminum chairs, a dozen servers, and a group of unemployed programmers. Google made about $25 million in profit in 2000; that figure quadrupled in 2001, to about $100 million, and tripled last year, to $300 million. Internet analysts at Bancorp Piper Jaffray, a well-known U.S. investment consultant and research institution, predict that Google's total revenue this year may double to $700 million.
While the surrounding Internet companies are collapsing one after another, Google is the one with the best scenery here. Therefore, a big tree attracts the wind, and its rich market has already become a long-coveted target for many competitors. Yahoo is taking aim at this target. Verture, the largest search engine website, is not far behind; it is a multi-billion dollar company that mainly provides free search services for websites, but its reputation is not as good as Google's. At present, Overture has sued Google, accusing it of patent infringement. It is said that more than 200 websites in China are also preparing to join forces to deal with Google.
However, for Google, the most deadly threat comes from Microsoft! The software giant has realized the importance of search engines and has set its sights on Google, a website that is currently enjoying unlimited success. Microsoft's involvement makes people shudder because it reminds people of the fate of Netscape; as the first web browser company to achieve great commercial success, Netscape fell under the siege of Microsoft.
Under Microsoft’s invincible offensive, will Google be the next victim? To prepare for a rainy day, Brin and Page invited Eric Schmidt, an experienced professional manager from Silicon Valley, to be Google's CEO. Brin gave up the position of chairman and only held the title of technical president; former CEO Page served as product president. "My job is just to add a little more order," Schmidt said. "One thing I must be clear about is that my arrival is not to crowd out entrepreneurs."
The 48-year-old Schmidt is indeed a A very suitable candidate. Before this, he had worked tit-for-tat with Microsoft in two jobs and had rich combat experience: he was the CTO (chief technology officer) of Sun Company, and then became the CEO of Novell Company, and these two companies They have all defeated Microsoft's prestige. Engineers gave way to professional managers. The purpose of the two founders inviting Schmidt was to enable him to maintain the company's strong development momentum even when the company was at its most glorious.
Google, a team of elites
To survive and develop, it must have a large number of talents, carry out a large number of acquisitions, and prepare more sufficient funds. But what is particularly important to Google right now is the urgent need to eliminate the arrogance and arrogance that is so prevalent in the company during this period. It's no wonder that when you take a look at Google's financial situation, you will find that it is very different from ordinary Internet companies. When the Internet bubble burned tons of money in other people's pockets like a bomb, Google earned a lot of money on its own.
Working at Google gives you a sense of pride. Google's headquarters is located in Mountain View, California. The corridors of the company's four buildings are filled with items praising Google from all over the world. The company even hires docents dedicated to explaining Google's history.
More than 70 of Google's 800 employees have doctorates. Even Google's chief engineer admits that his highly intelligent employees are quite arrogant about themselves. He hopes that Google's simple page can cover up this emotion and avoid publicizing it to the outside world. .
To some extent, Google feels like those flashy Internet companies during the 1999 stock market bubble. Perhaps a little informally, Google offices are dotted with party lava lamps, boxes of free Coke and candy, and giant colorful plastic balls that form the company's trademark. The cafeteria provides free lunch (and dinner, too, since there are a lot of programs to write) to those employees who love to work to death. Every day, Google receives more than 1,000 resumes asking to join this team.
Half by opportunity and half by wisdom
While the two entrepreneurs with technical backgrounds focused on improving the performance of search engines, Schmidt focused more on Create a perfect business model. Google has been operating search results advertising business for some time, but advertising fees are charged at a fixed rate. Its main competitor, the listed company Overture, had sales revenue of only US$668 million last year (and is expected to have revenue of US$1 billion this year), but it is ahead of Google in terms of advertising models.
Overture’s magic weapon is to adopt a sales strategy of selling the right to use fixed keywords. When users type in these keywords, the advertising revenue they receive from advertisers will also increase. Advertisers pay by click-through rate, rather than the traditional billing method of per thousand visitors.
According to Overture, for a period of time in 2001, Google executives even came to meet with Overture to compare technical parameters and other issues. In December 2001, Google started a similar test on the newsgroup network system and created a new service model named Adwords. The response to this model was huge as soon as it was launched, and by February 2002, Adwords had been expanded to all Google lists. Within 10 months, there were 100,000 bidders, with thousands more waiting to apply. It is estimated that search advertising almost tripled last year to $1.4 billion and is expected to reach $7 billion in the next five years.
“Some companies even purchased thousands of keywords, and they used these keywords to test diverse products and diverse words.” Sheryl, director of Google’s Adwords business Sandberg said. Since Adwords bidders are mainly American companies, and half of Google's search engine users are outside the United States, Sherry predicts huge growth in foreign markets. "Investments will imitate. This is a global bidding exercise," she said. Google's ads are sold in 11 languages.
Schmidt calls the success of Adwords "an accident—when we started running flat-fee advertising, my only directive was, 'Don't let our revenue go down.'" Adwords operates in an auction format where bidders can bid on the most popular search terms or terms on Google. Google charges fees based on the click-through rate of your ads. Bidding starts at 5 cents but often reaches $15, and even more for some high-end items like helicopter accessories. Interestingly, if an advertiser's response rate is too low, Google will accordingly lower its position on the web page, and will also promote the advertiser's competitor ads to obtain more click-through rates. This virtually puts pressure on advertisers. If the ad click-through rate is less than 0.5%, they will even ask the advertiser to modify the wording of the ad.
Google's long-term dream is to index all the public information in the world, from records to radio programs to movies, make them searchable, and then profit from them. . This sounds a bit sensational.
Google's counterattack
Just when Google was ambitiously trying to own the world, Microsoft began to exert its strength. Microsoft now has more than 70 engineers working on search, and its R&D staff will soon triple. Lately, its best partner has been Overture.
Microsoft's MSN online service is powered by Overture's search engine. Overture engineers frequently visit Microsoft in Redmond to study features for the next generation of search engines. Microsoft will also acquire a search engine company this year, and one possible candidate is San Francisco-based Looksmart. Both Overture, with a market value of US$669 million, and Looksmart, with a market value of US$328 million, are insignificant to Microsoft, which has US$38 billion in cash.
Google claimed that their position had not been disrupted. They have been actively trying to avoid Netscape's mistakes. "Netscape once laughed at the giant, and we will not make the same mistake." Google's CEO said, and he also pointed out that Google welcomes Microsoft to advertise on its web pages. However, there is more than one enemy. Although Yahoo has invested in Google and is also buying its services, in December 2002, it acquired Inktomi, a declining search engine company, for $235 million. Overture recently spent $177 million to purchase the assets of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves (2002 revenue of $74 million) spent $3.8 million to acquire Teoma. Even Google engineers admit that Fast's and Teoma's search results are very similar to theirs.
But at the same time, Google has made great achievements in other areas, including "personalized search technology" (which can "analyze" what you are interested in based on historical search records) and acquired a company. A company called Blogger helps people create their own online diaries and journals. More “blogs” means more content, creating more pages that can be advertised and creating more links to other pages. The more links there are, the better Google's results page will be. Recently, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics (Applied Semantics). Its content query technology can tailor ads for customers, not only based on the user's search, but also based on what the user has read on the Internet. Perform analysis. Within a week of acquiring Applied Semantics, rival Overture suffered a heavy blow - the company's stock fell by 30%.
It is urgent to go public...