2. Company Overview
Rebeka Verbeke
By 1996, they had built a search engine (initially
called BackRub) that used links to determine the
importance of individual web pages.
Google facts
Founded
1998
Founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation
4 September 1998
Initial public offering
19 August 2004
Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA 94043, USA
Founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin met at
Stanford University in
1995.
3. Company Overview
Rebeka Verbeke
Google facts
Founded
1998
Founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation
4 September 1998
Initial public offering
19 August 2004
Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA 94043, USA
Larry and Sergey named the search engine that
they built “Google”, a play on the word “googol”,
the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100
zeros. Google Inc. was born in 1998, when Sun
co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a cheque for
$100,000 to that entity – which until then didn’t
exist.
4. Company Overview
Rebeka Verbeke
Google facts
Founded
1998
Founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation
4 September 1998
Initial public offering
19 August 2004
Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA 94043, USA
The first “Google doodle” in 1998 was intended
to let visitors to the homepage know that
Google’s minders were offline at the Burning
Man Festival in Nevada. There’s now a team of
“doodlers” and we’ve posted more than 1,000
different doodles on homepages worldwide.
5. Company Overview
Rebeka Verbeke
Google facts
Founded
1998
Founders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation
4 September 1998
Initial public offering
19 August 2004
Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA 94043, USA
6. Company Overview
Rebeka Verbeke
Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he
"wanted something that, once you put
it in there, would be hard to take out",
adding that the slogan was "also a bit
of a jab at a lot of the other
companies, especially our
competitors, who at the time, in our
opinion, were kind of exploiting the
users to some extent."
The words: "Don't be evil" form part of the sixth point in these Core
Values, and in full states: "Do the right thing: don't be evil. Honesty
and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond
reproach. We make money by doing good things.
7. Company overview
Rebeka Verbeke
In 2000, we introduced AdWords, a self-service
programme for creating online ad campaigns.
Today our advertising solutions, which include
display, mobile and video ads as well as the simple
text ads that we introduced more than a decade
ago, help thousands of businesses to grow and be
successful.
On April Fools’ Day in 2004, we launched
Gmail. Our approach to email included
features like speedy search, huge amounts
of storage and threaded messages.
8. Company overview
Rebeka Verbeke
Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052
shares of Class A common stock took
place on Wall Street on 18 August 2004.
We acquired digital mapping company Keyhole
in 2004 and launched Google Maps and Google
Earth in 2005. Today Maps also features live
traffic, travel directions and street-level imagery,
and Earth lets you explore the ocean and the
moon.
9. Company overview
Rebeka Verbeke
In 2006, we acquired online video sharing site
YouTube. Today 60 hours of video are uploaded
to the site every minute. Cat videos, citizen
journalism, political candidacy and double
rainbows have never been the same.
Amidst rumours of a “Gphone”, we
announced Android – an open platform for
mobile devices – and the Open Handset
Alliance, in 2007.
10. Company overview
Rebeka Verbeke
In June 2011, we introduced the Google+
project, aimed at bringing the nuance and
richness of real-life sharing to the web and
making all of Google better by including
people, their relationships and their
interests.
12. Our culture
Rebeka Verbeke
It’s really the people that make Google the kind of company it is. We hire
people who are smart and determined, and we favour ability over
experience. Although Googlers share common goals and visions for the
company, we hail from all walks of life and speak dozens of languages,
reflecting the global audience that we serve. And when not at work,
Googlers pursue interests ranging from cycling to beekeeping, from frisbee
to foxtrot.
We strive to maintain the open culture often associated with start-ups, in
which everyone is a hands-on contributor and feels comfortable sharing
ideas and opinions. In our weekly all-hands (“TGIF”) meetings – not to
mention over email or in the cafe – Googlers ask questions directly to
Larry, Sergey and other execs about any number of company issues. Our
offices and cafes are designed to encourage interactions between
Googlers within and across teams, and to spark conversation about work
as well as play.
16. What we believe
Rebeka Verbeke
Ten things that we know to be true
We first wrote these “10 things”. From time to time we revisit this list to see
if it still holds true.
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Our
homepage interface is clear and simple without ads and distracting, and pages load
instantly to serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.
17. What we believe
Rebeka Verbeke
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on
solving search problems, we know what we do well and how we could do it better.
Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new
products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to
previously unexplored areas and to help people access and use even more of the ever-
expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
We know that your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web,
you want it right away – and we aim to please. Our goal is to get people to leave our
homepage as quickly as possible.
18. What we believe
Rebeka Verbeke
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on
websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they
are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new
solutions for mobile services.
19. What we believe
Rebeka Verbeke
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue that we generate is derived from offering search
technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and
on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use
AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take
advantage of our .
7. There’s always more information out there.
Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search
service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily
accessible.
20. What we believe
Rebeka Verbeke
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to
information for the entire world and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more
than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains. We offer Google’s search
interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content
written in their own language and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products
in as many languages and accessible formats as possible by using our translation tools.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging and that the
challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen
with the right company culture (best company to work for, in last couple of years).
10. Great just isn’t good enough.
Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon
them in unexpected ways.
