Google: In terms of its History and Impact (EOTO1)

Today, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin boast a highly impressive net worth of at least 53 million dollars apiece. This may not come to a surprise to most as these two began one of the most successful and widely recognized companies in the modern era. Holding a current market value of 858$ billion dollars and averaging 3-4 searches per person, per day (in terms of the world population) they are a hard company to ignore. Although, while it may be challenging to look past their current success, similar to most successful companies they stem from quite the humble beginning.

Page and Brin began the powerhouse known today as Google out of their dorm rooms at Stanford University. By maxing out their credit cards and using discounted computer parts they were able to engineer a computer program they named BackRub. This program utilized a data collection system known as PageRank which backtracked links to determine the importance of a page. A few years later the hype of Backrub had officially spread from the academic world into the investors of Silicon Valley. In August of 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Page and Brin a check of 100,000 dollars and simultaneously the pair decided to change the name of their newly incorporated company. It was here Google Inc. was born and set off with the mission to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Since then, Google has effectively branched out into several different aspects of the internet, finding success in many different places. For starters, Gmail, the email server created by Google in 2005, is the most popular email server in the world, serving more than 1.5 billion active users. Chrome, Google’s signature web browser, has been installed more than 5 billion times. Youtube, a video search engine created by Google, has over 1 billion videos watched on it a day and is the second-largest search engine in the world (behind Google of course). Finally, Android (launched in 2007) controls around 85% of the mobile operating system market and is the system used on almost every phone not owned by Apple.

As a result of this success, Google has revolutionized the way we see online advertising. This is because of two crucial factors. Due to the massive amount of reach they have into many different areas of the internet, Google is able to track more personal information about consumers than anyone else on the internet. In addition to that, they hold such a popular search engine that everyone wants to use it, and in turn, it becomes the most sought-after place for companies to advertise. Combining these two factors Google is able to place certain advertisements in the place they are most likely to be bought. This leads to Google not only charging large amounts of money for companies to show up at the top of their search results but also Google making high revenue as a percent of sales from these companies. In conclusion, Google effectively plays both sides of the fence controlling the data being used as insight and the location for which the ads are being placed.