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I Google. You Google. Everybody Googles.
The very name Google has become more than just part of the Internet landscape, it has become part of the vernacular. Every day millions of visitors come to Google.com to get information on every topic under the sun. From high school students doing homework assignments to employers checking out the background of potential employees, Google has become a primary research tool.
While there are hundreds of search engines, none has proven to be as useful and pervasive as the one created by Sergey Brin (right) and Larry Page (left). Page and Brin met as graduate students at Stanford University, with each taking an immediate dislike for the other.
Fortunately, their shared passion for data mining helped them to overcome their initial personality issues. In 1998, the two introduced Google in a paper entitled: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. At the time, Google was searching 24 million Web pages and, according to the paper, the immediate goal was to scale up to 100 million pages.
As of late 2004, Google was searching over 8 billion pages. In 2004, Google had nearly $3.5 billion in revenues (99% from advertising) and that number was expected to be substantially higher in 2005. Google is in the process of expanding its horizons well beyond the world of a mere search engine. They have already launched a mail service, a networking community and a sophisticated mapping program. While they have delved into other areas, don't expect them to neglect their bread-and-butter.
"The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing," Page said in an interview with Business Week. "And we're a long, long ways from that."
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