Google Inc.

Dr. Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google Inc..

Google, Inc. is a US corporation established in 1998 that runs the Google search engine and other online services. Google is headquartered at the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California, and employs over 3,000 workers. Dr. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Novell, took over as Google CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.

Google began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University who developed the hypothesis that a search engine based on analysis of the relationships between Web sites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. It was originally nicknamed BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant ones, Page and Brin decided to test their ideas as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. The domain www.google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally founded their company, Google, Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

Google got a big break in 1999 when AltaVista, the most popular search engine among knowledgeable Internet users, relaunched as a portal and alienated those users. The Google search engine gained a following for its simple, clean design (imitating the early AltaVista) and relevant search results.

In 2000, Google began selling advertisements by the keyword so that they would be more relevant to the end user. The ads were text-based in order to keep page design uncluttered and fast-loading. The concept of selling keyword advertising was originally pioneered by Overture, formerly Goto.com. While many of its dot-com siblings went under, Google quietly rose in stature while turning a profit. U.S. Patent 6,285,999, describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 80 percent of all search requests on the world wide web through its own web site and clients like Yahoo!, AOL and CNN. Google's share fell in February 2004 when Yahoo! dropped Google's search technology in order to deliver independent results. As further evidence of Google's popularity, the word "Google" has entered North American slang as a verb meaning, "to perform a web search (using Google's search engine)".

Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't Be Evil".

Google became a publicly traded company on August 19, 2004. Since the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization has risen greatly. On June 7, 2005, Google was valued at $80 billion, making it the world's biggest media company by stock market value, briefly surpassing Time Warner. With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies, in particular Microsoft Corporation.

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