Google Net Worth, Money and More
Net worth: $350 billion
“The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we’re a long, long way from that.”
-Larry Page, Co founder, CEO, Google.
Google needs no introduction. It is an American multinational corporation which specializes as a search engine and other internet related services. More than its literary definition, Google is a life savior for people across the globe.
Early Days
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google back in 1996 when they were doing their PhD at Stanford University. What they did differently for mother conventional search engines was that they developed a better system called Page Rank, which analyzed the relationships and connections between various websites. Unlike other search engines which counted the number of times a particular word or phrase was searched for and ranked results according to that, Google ranked the relevance of a website according to how many pages it had and their importance.
Google was initially called ‘BackRub’ by Page and Brin because the new search engine checked back links to a website. The name Google came when the word ‘googol’ was misspelled. Googol meant one hundred zeros after one, so the search engine was immediately named Google which meant that it would provide huge amount of information about anything under the blue sky. Initially Google was operated under the website of Stanford University. It was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company started operating in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park. Craig Silverstein who was a PhD student at Stanford University was the first hired employee by Google.
The first funding for Google came in August 1998 from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co founder of Sun Microsystems, who donated $ 1, 00, 000. In 1999, Google founders Page and Brin decided to sell off Goggle as it was taking up too much time and hampered their studies. They offered to sell it to Excite CEO, George Bell for an amount of $1 million, which he rejected. In 1999, Google got a funding of $25 million from major investors.
Five years later in 2004, Google received its initial public offering when Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt decided to work together till 2024. The company let out 19,605,052 shares which were sold at an online auction at $85 per share. The sale of shares increased the market capitalization of Google to over $23 million, which by January 2014 had grown to $397 billion.
“I am big now”
In March 1999, Google shifted its office from Menlo Park to Palo Alto in California. The next year, Google started selling advertisements with each keywords that was searched for. The advertisements, thought, were exclusively text based so as not to decrease the speed of the page and make it look clean.
In September 2013 Google launched a new company called Calico, which in future will be operated by Apple. By September 2013, Google had 70 offices operating in 40 countries. Google now is a part of the coalition of public and private organizations called the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which includes other sites like Facebook, Intel and Microsoft. This organization aims towards making internet access affordable so that more and more people can access it.
Since 2001, Google has been acquiring many companies, mostly small capital funded firms. In 2004, Google acquired the startup company Keyhole Inc. and rename it as Google Earth. The big turn came when in 2006 Google had acquired You Tube, the video search engine. In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick and GrandCentral for $3.1 billion and $50 million respectively. It renamed GrandCentral as Google Voice. Google kept on acquiring more and more companies.
On August 15, 2011, Google made its biggest acquisition when it acquired Motorola Mobility. This move was made to help Google gain Motorola’s patent portfolio in a time when rival companies like Microsoft and Apple were battling against Android. Gradually, Google fired 4,000 Motorola employees and sold its manufacturing units to Flextronics. On January 2014, Google announced that it was selling Motorola Mobility unit to Lenovo.
“I have the best products”
In 2011, Google earned 96% of its revenues from advertisements, thanks to DoubleClick, which Google had acquired. Using the DoubleClick techonology, Google presents relevant advertisements to target audience that would help them.
Another product, Google Analytics helps the owners of websites to track the usage of their website by the public. Google’s advertising products, AdWords and AdSense help website owners to earn money every time the advertisements the websites display are clicked.
One of Google’s biggest products, Gmail, the free e mail service, was launched in April 2004 but was available to the public only since 2007. This was the first mailing service in the world which kept all the mails from one conversation in a single box. Gmail provides 15GB free storage to every user.
Google Apps, another product from Google, permits organizations to bring products of Google like Gmail or Google Docs into their domains. There are many other versions of this Google Apps, like Google Apps for Business, Google Apps Standard which is the basic free version, Google Apps for Education, Google Apps for Government etc.
Another product, Google Translate is a translation service, which can translate the data in 35 different languages. Google also started Google News in 2002, which automatically summarized news from various news websites.
Among all the other products, not to forget Google Chrome, the web browser, which is used by millions of Internet users across the world.
The Internet King also does Charity
In 2004, Google started the nonprofit organization, called Google.org, with the objective to create awareness about climate change, global public health and global poverty. It had a start up fund of $1 billion. In 2008, Google launched another project which invited ideas on how to help the community ad had Google users vote their favorites. Two years later, Google announced the names of the winners and gave away prizes worth $ 10 million.
