How Did They Come Up With The Name Google & Their Success Story

Reading about success stories in the field you one day hope to build your web business in is an excellent idea, you can see their mistakes as well as their triumphs, and therefore will have foresight that they did not have. Here is a success story about Google and their rise to power from a small business in a friend’s garage to the company it is today.

How the road to success started…

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995 and within a year they were working on their first search engine – “Back Rub” (the logo was actually a scan of Larry’s hand!) they coded in Java and Python.

“BackRub” soon became hugely successful and Stanford’s servers could not contain the bandwidth needed to support the search engine.

In 1997 Page and Brin decided that their “BackRub” needed a new name – Google, which was derived from the mathematical term: googol (which is a very big number!) thus showing their desire to search through every nook and cranny with their engine.

In August 1998 a badly needed check to the tune of $100,000 was waved in front of Google’s eyes by Andy Bechtolsheim, this set them going on a mad money making run with over $1million being invested initially.

Google was getting over 10,000 search queries a day even while in beta and considered one of the best search engines around.

It was not until early 1999 that Google outgrew their “garage office” and moved into a proper office in Palo Alto (somewhere in California I guess!) they now had 8 employees (all engineers/programmers) it was then that Omid Kordestani joined – in sales and marketing, many believe he renovated Google and made it the company it is today.

By the end of 1999 Google’s servers were busy receiving over 500,000 search queries per day.

The “Google of today”…

In the year of the millennium (2000) Google started to become the company it is today, they introduced the search engine in 15 different languages, won a “Webby award”, announced that they had successfully indexed 1 billion webpages thus being  the biggest search engine of all time and became partners with YAHOO!

They also launched “AdWords” and the Google toolbar – so that you no longer had to go to the Google.com homepage to search.

Over the next few years we saw Google progress on the big highway to success, releasing more products.

How they made all that money

how did they actually make all those billions?

The answer is simple – adverts!

Google never made any real money until they released its best selling product – AdWords, which in a nutshell sells ad space next to related search results. Google AdWords became very popular with thousands of companies paying money for their site to be displayed next to search results, which was both good for them because it gave them sales and for Google because it gave them lots of money.

97% of Google’s revenue in 2011 was ads (that’s a massive $32.2billion out of a total of $37.9billion!) how do they use ads so effectively? Keywords, the word “Insurance” was Google’s most expensive keyword at around a top CPC (Cash Per Click) of $54.91 for companies to advertise its products through adwords, other top keywords were: Loans, Mortgage, Attorney, Credit, donate and degree.

So why is Google AdWords so much better than other ad selling search engines?

AdWords is better, than any of their counterparts (e.g. Yahoo, Bing etc.) because Google maximises the revenue they earn by selling the top ad space to the company most likely to pay Google to advertise the most. This is different to Yahoo’s method of selling the best ad space to the company who wish to pay the most for certain keywords.

So in this slight technical difference Google maximise the profit they recieve, a search engine marketing firm in California estimates that Google earns almost 30% more revenue than Yahoo per ad.

Google AdWords was actually their third attempt at making an ad auction product, the other attempts had failed miserably.

So a real key to money making success is perseverance,

money will come,

just you will have to wait and be patient!