Google: a Search Engine

Google: a Search Engine

We all use the internet and we all, well most of us, know about Google. Google is a search engine that helps us look for a certain website according to our keyword we type in at the search box. Google has dramatically changed our lives by making internet browsing easier for us and I will now tell you how it became a household name. Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. The name "Google" originated from a common misspelling of the word "googol", which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb "google", was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet. In 1998 Sergey Brin created a computerized version of the Google letters using the free graphics program GIMP after teaching himself how to use it. The exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo. “There were a lot of different color iterations,” says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo. “We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn’t follow the rules.”
Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, is referred to as "the Googleplex". The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate...

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