From obscurity to the center of stage

Google, initially a humble graduate research project by two Stanford students, later on evolved at so amazing a rate, today has already ranked among top of all technology companies in the world. Glorious success Google achieved though, it never slowed down its pace, on and on kept expanding.

Many interesting and helpful softwares came up available to our everyday uses, while even more now showcased in beta from the Google Lab are still undergoing regular improvements with Googlers’ infinite efforts. It not only provides the most accessible world information to individuals before the screen, but also to those outdoors. Early since 2000, Google started its exploration in wireless search, which was meant to bring Google search to a worldwide audience of mobile users. In the year 2004, the initiative idea eventually matured into “Google SMS”, a new technology enabling people to send queries through their cell phones and get instant, accurate response. Google not always stays away from advertisements, actually it has a special column for keyword-targeted advertising to various businesses. Like “Adwords” introduced in 2000, “Google Catalog Search” in 2001, “Froogle” in 2002, its continual efforts help Google users easily fetch multiple sources for specific products they want and do their shopping simply on line. Google penetrated its power into people’s workplaces. “Google in a box” from 2002, to “Blue Google Mini” newly-born in 2005, the first hardware product ever sold through the “Google Store”.

Love of innovation stimulates highly-rapid growth of this company. The annual “Google Programming Contest”, first held in 2002, granted tempting rewards to winners for a daunting challenge. Following is the contest’s requisition: all that Google provided were 900,000 web pages in pre-parsed, raw format, together with a “ripper” program for processing the pre-parsed data. Competitors’ mission was to write a program that would do something interesting with the data, the result of which was expected to scale to a web-sized collection of documents. The emphasis upon “interesting” is made so clear. Google needs innovative ideas that can strike people’s fancies in the hope of obsessing even more users. See, it’s really a tiring task for me to list new interesting service Google brought to us: “Google Zeitgeist”, “Google Blogger”, “Google Local Search”, “Gmail”, “Google print”, “Google group”, “Google sitemaps”, “Google earth”, “Google talk”, “Google desktop”, “Google Blog Search”, “Google reader”, “Google Base”, “Google Analytics”, “Google Book Search”, … Still, there should be more to come.

Without the ambitions and endurance of Larry and Sergey there is no such Google for today. Actually at the beginning they had little interest to engage in business by constructing a company of their own, but tried to find an investor who might want to license their searching technology. However, unable to interest major portal players of that day, they finally decided to make a go of it themselves. Andy Bechtolsheim, the first investor, who used to take a long view, wrote them a check for $100,000, assigned to Google Inc. So dramatically, Google Inc. that had never existed till then should at first be set up to deposit the check they got. With the help from families, friends, acquaintances, ultimately they brought in a total of $1 million. Then how about today’s Google? In October 2004, Google announced their first quarterly results as a public company, with record revenues of $805.9 million, up 105 percent year over year. On the finish of 2005, Google announced a significant new agreement with AOL that includes its $1 billion investment for their global online advertising partnership. Unbelievable though, Google keeps running so smooth over the decade and continually integrate more fresh blood into this growing family.