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Google History
The concept behind what would be known as Google was conceived in the January of 1996 as the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin who at that time were PhD students at Stanford University. The two met while working on their computer science PhDs sometime in the spring of 1995, and despite initial problems seeing eye to eye, they eventually found a common interest in the retrieval of relevant information from large amounts of data. BackRub, as it was known was a mathematical algorithm that determined the importance of a website by analyzing the "back links" pointing to the given website was born.

During Google’s early days as BackRub, it was housed in Larry Page’s dorm room, and was constructed from a network of computers that Page and Brin procured from the school’s loading docks. The new technology’s popularity was beginning to grow in the campus.

By the start of 1998, the search engine had grown to a substantial size, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought more hardware with which they would be able to support further growth. The problem now was that they did not have enough funds to grow the service any further. They decided that they would have to look for investors and put their PhD studies on hold and went about writing a business plan.

How Google came into being was when Page and Brin visited Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and a friend of a faculty member at Stanford. After a demonstration, Bechtolsheim was interested, but did not have time to go into any in depth discussion regarding the service. He just made them a cheque of $100000 which was made out to Google Inc., which at the time did not exist. This prompted the two to quickly set up the company. Google Inc. officially opened for work on September 7th 1998. It was situated in a friend’s garage, and played office to Page, Brin and Craig Silverstein, who was Google’s first employee. At this time they were already handling 10,000 queries a day, and were starting to receive substantial media attention. In February 1999 they moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to accommodate the growing number of staff, and eventually to the Googleplex, which is Google's current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google Technology
The search engine’s massive popularity lies in its ability to turn up results for search queries very quickly and accurately (University of Minnesota “Browsing the Web”). Google’s database boasts a 6-billion-item index, which includes web pages as well as newsgroup articles and images (Parker, P. 2004). The site receives up to 250 million searches a day, which equals to roughly 18.7 million hours spent on the site per month (Sullivan, D., 2003, Sullivan, D., 2004).

Google's PageRank algorithm, which was named in part after Larry Page, analyzes recursive links between sites. This works by assigning every page its own PageRank which is determined link to the page, and how important the linking pages are. This helps to determine the sites that are of actual importance, and enables Google to deliver results that are as accurate as possible. Sites on the web are gathered by the Googlebot, a Web Crawler which trawls the internet going through links. Google then creates a digital copy or a cache of pages that are new or actively tries to update the cache, removing links that are no longer working and updating pages that have been changed all this takes place on Google’s server (Price, G., (2001)). The cache’s purpose is to allow dead links to be viewed even though the source is down for whatever reason. The pages do not stay in the Google cache, perpetually, and although a useful feature has been the source of some legal disputes (Olsen, S., 2003).

Google’s ability to handle such a huge volume of traffic lies in its unique computer architecture, which distributes a search query over many servers operating in small networks. Queries are distributed over the networks depending on the user’s physical proximity to that network. According to a consensus it is believed that Google has an estimated 100,000 servers, although a somewhat more accurate estimate puts the number of servers at between 63,272 machines to 79,112 machines. On the higher end, Google would have whopping 316,448 GHz of computing power, 158,224 GB of RAM and 6,180 Tb of hard disk space (Levy, S., 2004, Tristan, L., 2004).