The Birth of Google

I remember back in the day hearing this word "google" and thinking it was just a silly name, now it's even it's so popularly used that it is in dictionaries and being bid on my top competitors.

Ever wonder what started it all? Here's a link to an article about Google's history: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle.html?pg=1&topic=battelle&topic_set=

"Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure."

...basically it took off from there. Linking and backlinking, then rating each site based on how much it was linked to and how much it linked out. Read the article for more. It was long but pretty interesting.

Another interesting thing about Google is how they set up their search, in that they have SEVERAL COPIES of the internet at all times, randomly indexed on thousands of servers, so actual distance between pages doesn't have any effect on the search time. In fact, they have several of these clusters of servers across the country to handle searches for a specific geographic area, to spread out traffic among several systems.