Delhi Planet Weekends - Things You Won’t Know About Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two names that may not be as famous as Shahrukh Khan or Angelina Jolie but names that would live on for many decades to come. Today in the year 2007, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the internet without Google.

Google Inc, the company that started out purely as a Search Engine in September 1998 now offers a gamut of services like Gmail,Video Sharing,News,Blogging platforms and lots more.So much so that “google”,has become a major part of our lives. DelhiPlanet bring to you some unknown facts about Google and it’s two founders.

• Q.Connect Bill Gates and the Google Guys(Page and Brin) ?
  Ans.No,it’s not the rivalry that they currently share.Larry Page and Sergey Brin both of whom were Stanford Dropouts,did most of the research work for their Phd program at the William Gates Computer Science Center in stanford. Bill gates had donated $6 mn to the center and it was here that the early seeds of google were sown.




• Page Rank, was a concept developed by Page. Page derived this concept of ranking web pages from the fact that references to whitepapers published by scholars are cited in numerous other places. So a really famous whitepaper would automatically have many references in other whitepapers. The Pagerank alogorithm was developed by page and his mentor Rajeev Motwani and was orginally called backrub.




• The word Google is derived from the mathematical term Googol which is 1 followed by 100 zero’s. Brin and Page orginally wanted to name their company Googol, but a spelling mistake made it google. The term Googol was coined by American Mathematician Edward Kasner and his nephew Milton Sirotta. Kasner also coined the term Googolplex which is 1 followed by a googol of zero’s. Not suprisingly Googleplex is the name of the Google Headquarters in Mountain View.




• Google.com is a website that possesses one of the cleanest interfaces and that has been one of it’s major selling points. However Page and Brin did not desire such an interface initially. It turned out this way only because they did not have enough money to hire a good designer.




• People working at Google, better known as Googlers are not allowed to tell one another “to Google” someone or something. It’s because there is a risk that the word “Google” could become so commonly used that it becomes synonymous with the word “search”. If this happens, they could lose protection for their trademark, which could result in other people using the word “Google” to refer to their own products, thus diminishing the google brand.(Source)




• Google and Microsoft are arch rivals and even Google fears that Microsoft can harm it if it wishes, one of their identified risks as stated by them is as follows “A large amount of information on the Internet is provided in proprietary document formats such as Microsoft Word. The providers of the software application used to create these documents could engineer the document format to prevent or interfere with our ability to access the document contents with our search technology. This would mean that the document contents would not be included in our search results even if the contents were directly relevant to a search. The software providers may also seek to require us to pay them royalties in exchange for giving us the ability to search documents in their format. If the software provider also competes with us in the search business, they may give their search technology a preferential ability to search documents in their proprietary format. Any of these results could harm our brand and our operating results.” . In short if microsoft desires it can prevent google software form indexing or reading microsoft office documents, thus harming google’s search capabilities. (Source)

If you wish to know more about Google and how it has become what it is today, then checkout The Google Story, by David Wise and Mark Malseed.

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posted by krisdhingra in Specials |