The Secret Sauce That Underlies Google’s Success
Google has become one of the most influential companies in the world, operating in numerous areas such as hardware, cloud computing, software and advertising. Founded in the late 1990s, it remains an essential force in Internet culture and the way people interact with technology – to the point that “googling” has entered the lexicon as a verb synonymous with searching online. Google’s original search engine remains its most important product, but it has since expanded to offer a wide array of other services and products ranging from email and photo storage to productivity tools and mobile phone operating systems.
Google’s story began with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two graduate students at Stanford University in California who invented a system in which servers searched the Internet and organized results according to the relevance of each piece of information. They incorporated in 1998 and began raising outside funding. By the end of 1999, the company was processing 200 million searches a day and its name had become so popular that it entered the language as a verb, with “google” used to mean to search the Internet.
In 2004 Google went public and became one of the most successful initial public offerings in history, making Brin and Page instant billionaires. The company continued to grow, acquiring other sites and companies such as YouTube and DoubleClick, expanding its search capabilities beyond textual queries to include images and maps. In 2008, Google launched Chrome, a Web browser that quickly gained popularity.
The secret sauce that underlies Google’s success is its algorithm for ranking search results, called PageRank. PageRank determines how important a webpage is by assessing its relevance to the keywords that a user enters into a search engine. The algorithm is based on many factors, including the number of other websites that link to a particular page, but the specifics are kept private to avoid gaming the system by people trying to influence results.
In addition to its search engine, Google operates a vast network of data centers and has developed proprietary pieces of computer software that enable it to handle enormous amounts of data and deliver search results in an almost magical way. These tools include the Bigtable database system, which handles data in chunks and allows it to be accessed from multiple locations; MapReduce, which combines and reduces large pieces of data; and GFS, a file system that runs across several computers and stores files in different places. These technologies allow Google to deliver results in less than a second, even when searching for incredibly complex information. Google also employs machine learning to enhance its search abilities, helping it to differentiate between, for example, Penelope Cruz and Chevy Cruze (it has figured out that the former is a person while the latter refers to an automobile model). This is just one of many examples of the company’s ability to innovate in artificial intelligence and other fields. The company continues to develop innovative technologies and is now the jewel of parent company Alphabet Inc, which also includes subsidiaries that operate in areas such as self-driving cars (Waymo) and biomedical research (Calico). Google has offices around the world.
