Cooper Hewitt says...
Founded in 1997, Google was the collaborative effort of both Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Both were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, and conceived of creating a search engine that calculated the importance of web pages based on their visitor traffic. The search engine was initially known as “BackRub,” based on the program’s evaluation of so-called backlinks to calculate webpage importance, but the company changed the name to the now omnipresent “Google,” registering that domain name in 1997. “Google” originated from an opportune misspelling of “googol,” a term denoting the number 1 x 10100—in other words, an unfathomably large quantity that aptly reflects the search engine’s capacity to collate vast amounts of web page data. Initially, Google operated out of the garage of employee Susan Wojcicki, but it wasn’t long before its efforts were written up in PC Magazine, which noted the search engine’s “uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results.” By 2000, the company had grown exponentially and its services expanded, offering Google searches in over 15 languages. In 2005, Google developed Google Maps, which fundamentally changed the way people situate themselves in space and how they navigate the world. In 2015, Google reorganized under the umbrella company Alphabet Inc., a conglomerate formed by Page and Brin. Google overtook the search engine market in the space of fewer than 20 years, and today is the most-used search engine in the world, handling over two trillion searches per annum. As a whole, Google is one of the most ubiquitous corporations of the twentieth century, one that has forever changed the dissemination of information and the research landscape as well as shaping new definitions of corporate responsibility in the information age.
