How Google Works: The More You Search, The Better The Results

The search engine of Google handles around 70% of online requests. However, that is not the only thing that Google does. The company has cloud services, makes software, hardware, payment solutions, runs an ads platform, started a social network, pretty much everything. Google, along with its parent company Alphabet, has become a technology powerhouse.

When you take a look at today’s top tech leaders, Google had quite a late start in 1998. Both Apple and Microsoft were founded in the mid-70s while IBM was formed in 1911.

Things first started when Larry Page, a University of Michigan graduate, enrolled in a computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

His doctoral thesis was about the World Wide Web or WWW. When he wrote it, the web was not what we know today. In his thesis, Page wrote about whether you could determine which site was more important through links between pages. From there, he proposed a theory that we could develop an algorithm to automatically do this. If you know about the search engine of Google and how it works, you will know that this was Google’s beginnings.

It took years for Page to work on his thesis which proved to be a quite challenging math problem. He came to another student to ask for help in refining the math. They worked on it together, naming it PageRank. The algorithm was then integrated into a search engine.

After one year, Page realized that the results that his algorithm was returning were far superior when compared to those of other search engines. He also discovered that the more data the algorithm got fed, the better the results. More pages mean more links. More links mean more data for each site to establish its relevance and validity to a search.

The original name of the search engine was BackRub. But soon, it was changed to Google to reflect the scale of the project.

It was this PageRank algorithm with which the basis of Google was formed. On Jan 9, 1998, Larry Page, along with Sergey Brin, filed a patent for a node ranking method in a linked database. An interesting thing is that the patent was filed under Stanford University.

On Sep 4, 1998, the pair officially founded Google.

After operating for about three years, Google then entrusted the algorithm code with Amit Singal who joined the company the previous year. What Singhal added to the algorithm was that he rewrote its core structure. By doing this, it would be easier for the search engine to include new ranking criteria. This was the algorithm’s first major change. And from there, it has gone through constant evolution.

Through the years, the company has shifted from being a search centric company to an overarching technology company with a large search division. With Google, users can access things such as Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, and all the hardware like the Google Pixel and Google Home.

Google, has now become a giant tech company that has been accumulated through many acquisitions made by the company throughout the years. This growth technique is one of many techniques that tech companies use to acquire and keep top tech industry talent.

Then who invented Google? It was Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But who many of the products are the works of many brains.