computer science

History of Google

History of Google is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand History of Google rather than just read about it. In short: Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg.

Key takeaways

History of Google belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect History of Google to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of History of Google from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful, and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition to many other products. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. The search engine has gone through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization. The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

BackRub Google has its origins in BackRub, a research project started in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", lead programmer Scott Hassan, who left before Google was officially founded as a company. While finding a topic for his doctoral thesis in 1995, Page considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web by understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"). Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, comparing the importance of tracking such backlinks to the role of citations in academic publishing. Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas. The research project was nicknamed BackRub, and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco. Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP), whose goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library". The SDLP was funded through U.S. federal agencies including the National Science Foundation. Brin and Page also received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the improvement of intelligence databases on the disorganized World Wide Web. Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point. Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm to convert the backlink data they gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance. The pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing search engines, which ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies and laid the foundation for their search engine. The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website and used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996) Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes ...

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996. Larry Page's patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li's earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2000.

Beta Originally the search engine used Stanford's website with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with History of Google

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what History of Google claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to History of Google before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about History of Google ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of History of Google

In research: History of Google appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses History of Google in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: History of Google is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics History of Google, History of Silicon Valley, History of companies of the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for History of Google outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study History of Google in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what History of Google means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain History of Google out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is History of Google in simple terms?

Why does History of Google matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study History of Google?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on History of Google.